How to do Rock, Paper, Scissors mentalism magic trick

The Rock, Paper, Scissors mentalism effect has been made famous by mentalists such as Derren Brown. A version of this clever little showpiece even appeared on the TV show The Mentalist. Many people have speculated on how this mind reading magic trick is done but few have got it right.Their first mistake has been to mistake the trick for the reality. When a mentalist performs any of his (or her) mind reading tricks he will rarely explain how he manages to achieve his results. Rather, he leaves this up to the audience, if they want to believe he used hypnosis or NLP (or even magic) that's up to them and fine by him. In reality, he will be using regular methods of trickery known to all magicians. Any talk of the Rock, Paper, Scissors effect being done by hypnosis or NLP is very wide of the mark!It is not necessary to persuade anyone convinced that performers like Derren Brown use psychological techniques (rather than conventional magic techniques) to achieve their effects. Instead, it can be pointed out that since it is easier to use regular magic techniques with a near 100% success rate, why would a performer want to use a method as complex and less likely to succeed as hypnosis or NLP?Mentalists today often refer to themselves as psychological illusionists. The illusion is that they use psychology rather than conventional magic tricks to achieve their mind reading effects. The reason for this is simple. Very few people these days believe in the power of magic anymore however many people believe in the magical claims of science. Thus, what is in effect a magical claim (such as being able to tell what card a person picked by simply reading someone's body language) is dressed us a psychology and more acceptable to modern minds.To conclude, some mentalism effects can be done using complex psychological techniques but all mentalism effects, including Rock, Paper, Scissors, can be done using regular magic techniques. The latter being much easier and much more effective.