Give the deck a good mix and then I want to show you something. As you can see, I have displayed the top three cards. We will call this one, the Queen, #1, this #2, and this one #3. What I need you to do is to pick one that we will work with, remember it’s numbered position, and the suit and value of the card.

Which one shall we go with? The Nine of Hearts at position #2? OK. Now, I will square up the deck and flip it over as if ready to deal. You chose the second card, so I will take the first card and insert it deep into the deck. Then, I will take the second card and insert it deep into the deck. Does that seem fair? It was fair, but now when I snap my fingers - *snap* - the Nine of Hearts has bubbled up to the top of the deck again. What a mystery!

The secret is that you maneuver an extra card behind the three card fan so that when you count off one, two or three cards as determined by your volunteer, you are always left with the chosen card at the top of the deck.

I stumbled across this one on Wayne Kawamoto’s Magic & Illusion section at about.com. It is a nice simple borrowed-deck-friendly effect, and you can use your favorite card reveal with this one. Check it out the about.com post here.

I am just going to look through this deck for a special card and place it face down on the table here. Every card in a deck of cards has a mate that is the same colour. The Six of Hearts has the Six of Diamonds, the King of Spades has the King of Clubs, and so on. Now I want you to be the magician. You are going to find the mate to that face down card out of this deck of 51. Do you think that you are up to that?

I am going to remove one special card from the deck and place it face down over here for later.

I am going to deal off of the top of the deck as normal, but I am going to hold the deck upside down so that you can see the faces of he cards and assure yourself that they are not arranged in any special order. So I will deal down one card at a time face up like this, OK? Now, whenever you feel the time is right, tell me to stop. Stop here? Are you sure? I can carry on if you want? Now, let’s turn over the deck and see what you have chosen on he top of the deck. As you can see, the top card is the Three of Spades. Now, please turn over the card that I removed earlier. What is it? It is the mate, the Three of Clubs!

The secret? Card selection and one simple sleight. When you look through the deck at the beginning to “remove a special card”, note the seventh card from he top of he deck, then locate and remove its mate. You will now use the sleight to force the seventh card.

Now for the sleight: I guess you could call it a “face up glide force.” The procedure is to turn the deck face up and start dealing off of the bottom in full view. Around the time that the third card hits the table, ask your volunteer to tell you when to stop. Often, they will stop you as the sixth card hits the table and no action will be required as the force card will be on the top of the deck. However, if they have you go past the sixth card, you need to remind them that they can say stop any time and during the pause, execute the glide. The glide involves sliding back the top card of the deck (which in this case is on the bottom closest to the table as your deck is inverted with faces up) with your middle, ring and pinky fingers about a centimeter so that you can deal the second card. This way, no matter when they call stop, the force card will be on top.

Here is a video tutorial on the glide, but of course you should learn he glide and other fundamental sleights from the Royal Road to Card Magic.

This trick is completely impromptu and is best performed with a borrowed deck.

Fan out the deck face down.

“Please choose a card without looking at it and place it in your pocket.”

“Now most magicians try to astound and amaze their audiences with their own abilities. I’m not interested in that. I am more interested in exploring the potential inside each and everyone of us to perform small miracles. I want to try an experiment now where you use your own intuition to determine the identity of the card in your pocket. Do you think that you will be able to do it? I am confident that you will.”

“I am now going to ask you a series of questions. Please name two of the four possible suits of cards - Clubs, Hearts, Spades, and Diamonds.”

“Hearts and Spades? Ok, now please name one of those two.”

“Spades? Very well. Now please name two of the following three cards, the Four of Spades, the Three of Spades, or the Two of Spades.”

“The Two and the Four? Ok, that leaves the Three of Spades. Since the Three of Spades is the card that you have named, it must be the one in your pocket. Go ahead and confirm this fact.”

The secret? The Si Stebbins stack. When the volunteer selects a card from the face down fan, separate the deck at that point so that the bottom half is in your left hand the upper half is in your right. Move your hands quite far apart while you talk and then place the left hand pack on top of the right hand pack. Be sure sure to glimpse the bottom card as you square up the deck which will tell you the identity of the selected card (add three to the value and advance the suit one position through CHaSeD order). The rest is acting and the magician’s choice.

This is “Trick 4” from Si Stebbins’ famous pamphlet Card Tricks and the Way They Are Performed published around 1900.

I have sixteen cards laid out in a four by four grid here. I will tell you that four of them are Aces. Now I am going to turn up four of the cards, none of which are Aces as you can see. Now you get to do the work from this point. I want you to imagine that these cards are attached to a thin sheet of fabric that you can fold along any horizontal or vertical line running between the cards. Choose a line to fold along and flip the cards over onto the other cards as if they were attached to fabric. Now keep folding until you have all of the cards into a single pile. Great! Now let’s look at what we have got. That’s curious, only four cards are face up in the deck and they are all Aces!

The secret, take twelve indifferent cards and the four Aces and arrange them as follows: Place an Ace in position 1, 6, 11, and 16. Deal the pack face down into a four by four grid like so.

1  2  3  4

 5  6  7  8

 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

The Aces will now be located along the diagonal running from top left to lower right. When you turn up the cards at positions 3, 8, 9, and 14 then carry out the folding procedure, the only four flipped cards in the pack will be the four Aces.

This effect comes from the great geekdad column at Wired.com. There is some additional explanation there as well.

I would like you to take this deck behind your back and cut it anywhere that you like. Now, without looking, take the top card and place it in either your left or your right pocket. Now take the next card and place it in your other pocket and return the deck to me. I am going to put the deck away as we will not need it.

Now I know that the two cards that you have selected are the King of Clubs and the Three of Hearts, but the key to this experiment is as follows: you are going to tell me in which pocket you have placed the King and in which pocket you have placed the Three. Do you think you can do that? In a moment I will ask you to tell me which card is in which pocket after which I will give you a brief seven seconds in which you may choose to change your mind. And if you tell us that the King of Clubs in in your right and the Three of Hearts is in your left pocket, that is the way they will be. And if you change your mind to say that the King is in your left and the Three is in your right, that is the way they will be.

So, please, tell me which card is in which pocket. The King is in your left? Very well. Now, for the next seven seconds you make change your mind if you wish. You want to change? Very well, the King of Hearts is in your right pocket and the Three of Hearts is in your left. Please show us the cards.

Believe it or not, there is really only one secret to this trick as the choice of which card is in which pocket is genuinely 50/50. The secret to knowing which cards they have taken is to use a stacked deck order such as Si Stebbins. Then, when you take the deck back and glimpse the bottom card, you immediately know which cards they have taken with no further trickery or investigation. If the 50/50 choice goes your way, you have a genuine miracle. If not, you still have the wonder of knowing which two cards were chosen freely.

The Si Stebbins system is described in detail in many magical sources. Here is a link to a booklet by Stebbins himself. The effect is related to my Effect #17 and was reverse engineered from this 1960 Chan Canasta performance: part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Please take this deck of cards, examine it for any irregularities and mix it thoroughly. Are you satisfied that it is completely mixed? Good. Now I am going to ask you to name two different card values from Ace to King. You do not need to name a suit as that would make it too hard for me. A 3 and a 9? Thank you. In a moment, I am going to give the deck quick shuffle without looking at the faces. When I do this, I am going try to bring at least one 3 and one 9 next to each other in the deck - or at least with only a single card between them. Ok, I think I did it. Now I will deal down the cards one at a time and we will see if I was successful… There: 9, Jack, 3! Shall we try again?

There is no secret to this trick. While it may be counter-intuitive, a freely shuffled deck will usually contain two named values of cards either adjacent to or within one card of the other. Let your participant freely shuffle and do not use a new deck or deck just used in a game without thorough shuffling. A borrowed deck is even better.

This is an intriguing probability trick. It’s success rate is surely less than 99%. Still, it could make a good sucker bet or a light intermission in a longer routine. Ninety-Nine Percent is taken from Garcia and Schindler’s “Magic With Cards” published in 1975.

I hold in my hands ten hearts, face down, numbered zero (represented by a King) through nine. I am going to spell the numbers from zero through nine. For each letter I say, I will move the top card to the bottom of the pack, but when I say the final letter of each word, I will place the card face up on the table. Z-E-R-O, it’s the King! O-N-E, and the Ace. T-W-O, now the two… When you get to the last card, mime moving from top to bottom with N-I-N-E. Take your bow!

The secret is a stacked pack running in the following order from top to face: 7, 4, 8, King, 6, 3, Ace, 9, 5, 2. You can come up with a number of creative ways to arrive at this stack. Martin Gardner suggests displaying a pyramid like this:

      A

   2    3

  4  5  6

7  8  9  K

Then, all face up, pick up the 7 and drop it on the 4, then drop both on the 8, then drop all three on the 2, drop all four on the 5, all five on the 9, all six on the Ace… ending on the King. Peal off the top three cards, face up, thus reversing their order and drop them onto the face of the pack. Follow this with a false shuffle if you like.

This effect is taken from an excellent article by mathematician Colm Mulcahy.

This is a curious experiment. Let’s look through two rounds of poker and see if we get an interesting result. Here are five hands of five card straight poker - five cards each, all face down, no draws. (Look through the first four hands and comment on their merits and potential betting strategies.) Now my hand here, the final one, is not so strong, but I would bet aggressively and lose.

Let’s move onto the next round. (Again, look through the first four hands and provide some analysis.) Now hopefully, the other four players think I am a sucker and call my aggressive bet again as this time I have a royal flush!

The secret here is to have a royal flush on the top of the deck. Then, after dealing out the first round of five hands face down, place the first hand face down on the deck, then the second face down on the deck and so on. False shuffle again, and deal five hands face down again and the royal flush will show up in the fifth (your) hand. You can experiment with stacking some other strong hands below the royal flush and they will show up in the second deal as well.

I found this simple self working trick in the little pamphlet that came with my Muphy’s Magic Stripper Deck. [Brief product review: Unfortunately, the stripper deck is cut unevenly and thus unreliable for its intended purpose.]

“Research shows that only a small proportion of a typical organization’s information assets are truly sensitive, normally around 5%. This 5% could be made up of financial records, trade secrets, or perhaps patient records, to name a few examples. This deck of cards represents the collected information assets of your organization, so two cards could represent the data that you would most not want to leave your corporate network. The two volunteers represent two officers of your organization.”

I spread the deck face up, then gather it and table it face down.

“We are going to conduct an experiment simulating information security architecture. The officers will defend their sensitive assets against a series of threats by deploying a series of countermeasures in response. This should lead to some illuminating results for all of us. Let’s begin.”

“The first threat that we must deal with is that if I am allowed to handle the cards, I may control the result through sleight of hand. The first countermeasure that we are going to employ is that only corporate officers will handle the cards between now an the end of the experiment.”

“The second threat that we are going to address is the possibility that the cards are marked. I assure you that the cards are not marked, but nonetheless, the second countermeasure that we will employ is that I will stand back far enough that reading small marks would be nearly impossible.”

“Sir, would you please cut the deck? Would you like to cut it again? No? Madam, would you now please cut the deck? Would you like to cut again? Yes? Please go ahead. Would either of you like to cut again? No? Ok. Now, sir, please pick up the top card and look at it without showing me, and madam, please pick up the next card and look at it as well. Remember these cards as they represent the most sensitive information held by your organization. Please show them to the other corporate officers that are gathered here today while I look away.”

“Now, sir, return your card to the top of the deck and you madam return yours on top of his. Sir, cut the deck, please.”

“At this stage, do I know where the cards are? Yes. I saw the cut and they are now close to the middle of the deck. To counteract this third threat, I will turn my back while you cut the cards again, madam.”

“Now do I know where the cards are? Well, if I could somehow know the identity of one of the cards, I would find the other one adjacent to it. The best way to counteract this fourth threat is to deal the deck alternating between two piles thus guaranteeing that the two selected cards are separated. I will ask you to do this now, sir, taking care to alternate left, right, left, right, and so on until you have two piles of 26 cards.”

“While he is doing this, madam, let me ask you if I will know where the cards are when he is finished? No? Actually, if I did know the identity of one of the cards and it was located ninth from the top in the left pile, then I would know that the other card was in the eighth, ninth, or tenth position in the right pile. The best way to address this fifth threat is to have the two of you each take a pile and shuffle it thoroughly. Please do so now - just make certain to take not to flash any cards to me.”

“Now could I know where the cards are? No, it seems completely impossible that I could have anything better than a random chance of locating the cards. However, I have to try.”

I pick up the left deck, briefly scan the faces, and place one card face down on the table. I do the same with the right pile placing a second card face down on the table. I then riffle the two piles together and spread the deck face up for later inspection.

“Looking at these cards, I have one red and one black. The red one is a nine of hearts and the black is a three of clubs, which I believe are the cards the you two selected earlier? This experiment demonstrates an element of every major system breach in recent history. Defenders guarded against every known credible threat, but missed the one that the attacker actually used.”

There are two secrets that work together for this effect. The deck is stacked to alternate red-black throughout, an arrangement that is unaltered by normal cuts. Then, after the volunteers pick up their two cards to look at them, they must return them as follows: the first card taken becomes first card replaced, followed by the second card taken. This reverses the order of these two cards, now the only two that are out of the red-black order. Then when the deck is later dealt into two packs, these two cards will be the only odd coloured cards in their respective packs. Try it out!

This effect is based on Juan Tamariz’ “Neither Blind Nor Stupid” from the Lessons In Magic DVDs.