Method:
Here’s what the effect looks like…
Someone freely names ANY card. You tell them that you have such incredible sleight of hand skill that you can ‘track’ their card as you shuffle the deck, and ‘place’ it in a specific place.
“It’s the 33rd card in the deck right now…now it’s 7th…now it’s 3rd…now it’s 20th.”
You hand the deck to the spectator and have him count 20 cards. Sure enough, their card turns up on the 20th card.
You tell him:
“That was hard. But you know what was harder? Doing it in that sealed deck over there…”
You pick up a deck from off the table, still in the card case. You take it out, and without doing anything to the cards, deal 20 cards. The 20th card is their named card.
This effect is so easy it’s hard not to laugh. But the structuring is very clever too—I think you’ll like it.
You’ll need two decks, both of them stacked in your memorized stack of choice. I’ll use Mnemonica for this demonstration.
With that, we’re ready to get into the meat of this, so let’s take our usual approach—breaking this down step by step…
- Someone freely names ANY card.
They really can name any card.
However, the second their mouth opens to utter the card, your brain has to be ready to connect that card with its position in your stack.
Let’s imagine they choose the JH.
In our head, we instantly know that the JH is the 20th card in our deck.
- You tell them that you have such incredible sleight of hand skill that you can ‘track’ their card as you shuffle the deck, and ‘place’ it in a specific place.
As you well know—we have no such ability.
Therefore, our job is to make it LOOK like we’re shuffling the whole deck, while in reality keeping the JH in its exact position, so we can then name that position later.
How do we do that?
It’s remarkably simple.
In fact, it’s even easier than I first dreamed up when I came up with this method.
See, my first idea was to get a break beneath the JH, and then shuffle everything above the break, then everything below the break. In essence, using the divided deck principle (when the bottom half is red and top half is black, you can shuffle each half individually without ever mixing the red and black.)
Then I realised you don’t even NEED the break.
Just grip the deck, ready for overhand shuffling, and shuffle off a number of cards that you know is LESS than 20.
Don’t be an adrenaline junkie and push it right to the wire, just shuffle off a good 10-15 cards. Mix those cards and then throw them back on top of the deck.
You just mixed up the order of the first 10-15 cards of the deck…but that doesn’t matter.
We don’t care about the order.
We care about the fact that the JH is the 20th card.
And you can shuffle those 10-15 cards as much as you like—you’re not going to change the fact that the NUMBER of cards is the same.
We can now turn the deck face up and do the same again. This time, shuffle off a good 20-30 cards.
You can repeat this whole thing a few times. The good part is—these aren’t false shuffles, and so our audience can tell we’re actually shuffling the deck.
(or at least, part of it.)
All we’re doing is mixing the ORDER of the cards before and after the JH—we’re never changing the NUMBER of cards before and after it.
If the card they named is right at the top/bottom, simply keep on doing the shuffle one way. For example, if they named the 2H, I would turn the deck face up and shuffle off 40 cards, throw them back on, and do the same again.
As we shuffle, we narrate…
- “It’s the 33rd card in the deck right now…now it’s 7th…now it’s 3rd…now it’s 20th.”
Of course, we simply end this by naming the original position of the card in the stack.
- You hand the deck to the spectator and have him count 20 cards. Sure enough, their card turns up on the 20th card.
This is pretty self explanatory.
Just sit back and enjoy at this point!
- You tell him:
“That was hard. But you know what was harder? Doing it in that sealed deck over there…”
You pick up a deck from off the table, still in the card case. You take it out, and without doing anything to the cards, deal 20 cards. The 20th card is their named card.
Of course, this is where the second stack comes in.
Up until now, it’s been in the card case, on the table.
Now we can open it up (or even get a spectator to do so) and count 20 cards, displaying the JH.
But do you know what the real beauty of this is?
Because we spent so long shuffling the first deck—the two decks look nothing alike!
How cool is that?
Super easy, super fooling, and super fun.
Next week, I’ll show you how to do this effect…even after the spectator shuffles the deck!
Here’s what it looks like:
Your spectator freely names ANY card. You let him shuffle the whole deck. While he does so, you tell him about your magic ‘Spidey Senses’ that let you sense the position of any card in the deck.
After he’s finished shuffling, you immediately call out a number.
He counts down to that number in his (shuffled) deck, and finds…
…his card!
Just when he thinks the effect is over, you point out a deck that has been on the table the entire time. You tell him that, although this sounds crazy, you think he managed to place the same card in the same position…in an entirely different deck!
You count down in the second deck to find…his card!
Until then, enjoy this!
Your friend,
Benji