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Assistance
Needed
Original Author: Unknown
Effect: You lay out a
bunch of cards on the table and have a member of your audience
pick one. Your assistant goes out of the room while this is
done. The assistant is called back in and knows the person's
card! This is repeated.
Card Trick:
1.
Have an assistant with you who knows exactly how the trick
works.
2. Lay out ten cards in the same layout as
the spots on a 10 card (four on each side and two in the
middle). The card in the upper left-hand corner must be a 10.
(Editor's suggestion:
After the audience has shuffled the deck, look through
it--perhaps pretending to find and remove any jokers--find a
10, and casually cut the deck so that the 10 is on top. Turn
the deck face down and deal the top ten cards into the layout,
starting in the upper left-hand corner.
--RS.)
3. Have your assistant leave the room. Ask an
audience member to help you with the trick. Have the person
point to one of the cards.
4. Call your assistant back into the room and
start pointing to cards one by one, saying "Is it this card?"
until the assistant stops you. (Or the assistant might stop
you and identify the card any time after you've pointed to the
first few cards.) The secret is that when you point to the
first card, which must be the 10 in the upper left-hand
corner, you point to the symbol (diamond, heart, etc.) whose
position on the 10 card corresponds to the position of the
selected card among the cards on the table. Therefore, your
assistant knows the person's card as soon as you've pointed to
the first card, the 10.
5. If you want an even more amazed response
from your audience, tell the audience member to try to trick
your assistant at one point by not picking a card. When you
start pointing to the cards again with your assistant, point
to the empty space in between the two middle symbols on the 10
card! This will have your audience thinking for hours on hand!
Editor's suggestion:
You should probably point to the cards in the same sequence
every time: start in the upper left corner and proceed through
the layout from left to right and from top to bottom.
Otherwise the audience can easily invent other ways the trick
might work such as pointing to the selected card after
pointing to any three others.
[Return
to Intermediate Card Trick Index]
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