I have prepared a very special deck of cards for this occasion. It contains only 38 cards and if you take a look, on the face of each card I have written a single letter. And, as you can see, the cards are in no particular order. As we proceed, we will only look at the letters and ignore the values of the cards.

Please take the deck face down and deal down exactly half of the cards - that is 19 - onto the table. Excellent. Now riffle the two packs together to make things more interesting. Good. And now that the deck is mixed, deal down half of the cards again to make two equally sized packs of mixed cards. Now, please choose one pack and I will take the other one.

Now, get ready for the next step. I am going to set a 60 second timer on my phone and when I hit start, you and I are going to have a little competition to see who can use up more of our letters spelling English words. Unlike Scrabble, proper nouns are allowed. Ok? Go! (At the end of 60 seconds, the volunteer will have done a good job using up most of his cards spelling a number of words.) I managed to find a solution. Look here, I spelled my stage name!

THRASHOR HACKER MAGUS

And, this is interesting, I think that you can rearrange this and this and this, and you can spell it too! Perhaps your subconscious love of my act influenced your shuffling? (If you personalize the trick for your participant, let him keep the deck.)

The secret? The Gilbreath Principle of course! By writing on a deck of cards with a large sharpy (or a “gold paint pen” works nicely), spell your desired word twice. If you keep your phrase under 26 letters long, you will be able to fit the resulting deck in a normal card box (recommended). Now, divide the letters into two packs, each containing all of the letters required to spell the phrase. Mix one of the packs and then arrange the other to be in exactly the same order. Place one pack atop the other and box them. You are ready to go.

To reiterate using a simple example, let’s assume you wanted to spell HEARTS. You would create the following cards:

HEARTSHEARTS

Then you might arrange the twelve card deck as follows:

ESTAHRESTAHR

Then, to perform, you have the volunteer deal six cards down, reversing their order before the riffle:

Pack 1: ESTAHR Pack 2: RHATSE

Then, based on the Gilbreath Principle, a riffle shuffle - whether perfect or sloppy - will guarantee that the resulting two halves of the deck will contain all of the letters required to spell HEARTS, but not their order. For example, after a sloppy riffle, you might have:

ESTRHATSEAHR

Then when you split the deck:

Pack 1: ESTRHA Pack 2: TSEAHR

Both spellers are able to spell the word.

I read about this effect once in an obituary for Martin Gardner - yes, I learned a trick from an obit. Unfortunately, I cannot find it online anywhere. If anyone can provide me with the reference, I would be very grateful. People really like personalized magic tricks. I often use a participant’s name, the name of the organization that is hosting my lecture, or, most recently, a company’s newly minted corporate slogan. You could kick things up a notch by having lettered cards professionally printed, or you can avoid defacing a deck by using blank index cards. Give it a try!