REVIEW: A Night with The ‘World’s Best Mentalist’ Nicolai Friedrich

CONTENT: Michelle Ng

IMAGES: AGP WORLD

I’m generally quite a skeptic by nature, which is why I was quite confident that Nicolai Friedrich was pretty much a magician with a few tricks up his sleeve. But I was proved wrong at his show, when he performed mind-blowing tricks for one night only at the Esplanade.

Nicolai Friedrich calls himself a mentalist, which refers to a subset of magicians who focus on mind-reading and predicting the future. His performance is so convincing that the winner of “The Best Mentalist Of The World” of the FISM World Championship of Magic in 2009 had the TV rights to one of his tricks bought by David Copperfield himself.

Still don’t believe in his abilities? He even managed to predict the TOTO numbers ( a 4 digit lottery game) correctly on 4th May (but was told not to do it again as it was against the Singapore law).

Nicolai explains that his ‘magic’ is only possible because of the way our brains perceive things and ‘how perception is limited’. This pretty much means that he uses our subconscious and sublimal messaging to allow his tricks to work. Even then, it’s still a bit surprising to see how he manages to guess a random word from a person’s mind and accurately pinpoint an audience member’s birthday and horoscope.

Here’s how one of my favorite acts went down. Friedrich asked a member of the audience, Sam to look for his own star sign in an astrology book. Friedrich guessed his star sign – Pisces – correctly, and asks “Is your birthday 9th March?”

Sam replies that “No, but it’s close, it’s actually 10th March.”

I was nearly grinning in glee that he screwed up a little, but the mentalist turned his drawing block around, which had “10th March” scribbled on it as he laughed off his little joke.

Give up trying to understand how his tricks work, because it’s clearly out-of-ordinary. Other tricks he performed included tearing up the front page of The Straits Times and making it appear in one piece in front of our eyes, testing a couple’s connection as they read each other’s minds and getting six random volunteers to select six numbers, which he promptly guessed right.

Ending the night with a final trick that involved the entire audience, he said that everyone should channel their energy into breaking a glass pitcher that a male volunteer held up. As the pitcher suddenly shattered, it left everyone on their feet and the volunteer stunned as it seemed as if the pitcher exploded by itself.

Tired of the same old magic tricks? Head over to see the mentalist when you find yourself in the same city as Nicolai Friedrich. I would definitely go see him perform again.

Nicolai Friedrich,The Best Mentalist of The World was Presented by AGP World