Here's a real clean card trick that is bound to amaze and surprise your friends.
Have a friend shuffle a standard 52-card deck to his satisfaction. The ask him/her to turn over, face up, a pile of twenty-five cards. As they count out the cards to twenty-five, act like you are intensely memorizing every single one of them in order. In truth you are only interested in the 17th card in the pile. Memorize that 17th card..
Turn the twenty-five card pile over, now face down, and set aside.
Take the remaining cards and do the following:
If it is a two through nine card, place it face up, and count out cards up to the number ten. For instance, if you turn up a six, you would place it face up, and then count out four cards coming down, saying "Seven, eight, nine, ten." If you turned up a three, then seven cards, saying "Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten."
If the card you turn up is an ace, ten, or picture, tell your friend that you must have cards 2 through nine for this trick and place the card on the bottom of the deck, face down like the rest of the cards. (Someone told me that aces and pictures work too, but I haven't verified it yet.)
Repeat this procedure until you have completed four columns of "ten counts."
Take whatever remaining cards you have after making the four columns, and place them face down on TOP of the twenty-five card pile you set aside earlier.
Now ask your friend to total up the numbers at the top of the four columns.
Say the total was 23. Counting from the very top of the set-aside-pile-plus-remainder-cards, state you are interested in the 23rd card. Just before turning over the 23rd card, state that it is the 17th card that you memorized at the beginning of the trick!
If you did everything correctly, it works every time! Amazing!
2 comments:
I was able to do this trick successfully -- and I was an *English* major!!!! Thanks!
hmm this is not entirely a trick, it's just a mathematical problem :)
52 cards, take 25 out, there are 27 left. The #17 card which you are to memorize, is the 17th card on the face-down deck of 25 cards now.
Ok, so let w,x,y,z be the number on each card of the 4 columns. Since you count till ten for each column, there are now (11-w)+(11-x)+(11-y)+(11-z) cards in the 4 columns, which is 44-(w+x+y+z) cards.
So, of the 27 cards, only 27-(44-(w+x+y+z)) cards left, which is -17+(w+x+y+z) cards left. Add this back to the 25-card deck. Since the 17th card is the card you memorize, -17+(w+x+y+z)+17 = w+x+y+z !!! Which would be the number you ask the participant to add up (at the top of the 4 columns)!!
And becoz of the math, you can vary the trick by taking 24 cards out instead of 25 initially, and memorize #16 of the 24 cards. It would still work.
Also, it doesn't matter either if you ask the participant to shuffle the remaining cards (after taking out the 25 cards initially) Try it!
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