Canasta described himself as a perceptionist, adept at warping an audience s attentions. He made no claims to Psi ability and loathed Uri Geller. In his many TV appearances he would do things like try to predict the number of vowels on the page of a book selected at random by somebody else, or forecast the sequence of cards in a shuffled deck. The relatively high failure rate of such predictions combined with Canasta s gravitas, gave his performances the feeling of pseudoscientific experimentation. My magic is not a question of skill in the hands, but rather of mental gymnastics, Canasta said.
Failure makes the successes more exciting.
60s Canasta was an international star, appearing on shows in Britain and France, and in the United States on the holy trinity of Ed Sullivan, Jack Paar and Steve Allen. He was by avocation a mathematician, and had a great love of gambling. He advised casinos on how to set the odds, and admitted that he once gambled away the entire advance for one of his books on magic in six hours at the tables. He died at age 79.