This is an easy and well-known magic trick, which anyone from a small child to a stage magician can convincingly perform using props which can be found from around the house. It takes a bit of practice and very little skill to amaze people with this simple illusion, where a small object seems to penetrate a solid drinking cup. It will probably be easier to understand this trick if you try it out first.

What You’ll Need

• Three non-see-through and identical plastic drinking cups which can stack on top of each other. The cups must stack without crushing the pom-poms, or creating a difference in the exposed areas of the cups beneath, as this is likely to give the trick away. They should also not be the type to stick firmly together with nested and tapped. Having to pull forcibly to get them apart could be both embarrasing and give away the existence of the fourth ball.
• Four identical small objects which weigh very little and are all the same colour. Small pompoms are ideal and this entry will use them as an example, but you can use cotton buds or even pieces of paper.

Preparation

To prepare for the trick before performing it stack the three cups on top of each other right way up, with a pompom inside the middle cup. It is essential that your audience do not know about this hidden pompom.

How to Do It

1. In front of your audience, place the other three pompoms onto a table, about seven or eight centimetres away from each other. Place one of the three cups upside down on top of each of the pompoms, ensuring that the cup with a hidden pompom in goes in-between the other two cups, ie in the middle. Put the cups down quickly so that the hidden pompom does not fall out, but don’t make this too obvious. If you do one quick and the others slowly it could look suspicious, so its best to do it all at the same speed.

2. Pick up the cup from the left hand side, place the pompom from underneath this cup on top of the middle cup with the hidden pompom inside, and then stack the cup from the left on top of this. Wave your hand or say some magic words if you like, and pick up both cups together. Underneath the cups there should be two pompoms. Your audience will believe you have just made the pompom between the two cups penetrate through the first cup and onto the table. In reality, this ball is now still hidden between cups.

3. Now put the empty cup on the left where there is no longer a pompom. Put the cup that contains the hidden pompom on top of the other two pompoms.

4. Repeat step two, this time placing the right hand cup on top of the centre cup. When the two cups are removed together, there will be three pompoms, and it will look like another pompom has gone through the cup.

The secret to this trick is to not let your audience know that there are four, not three, pompoms. It is vital that the audience cannot see into the cups. As with any magic trick, how well the performer creates an atmosphere of suspense and talks their audience through what is supposedly happening will determine how successful this trick is.