The Value In Card Tricks That Do Not Work Every Time

Many of us have true guilty pleasures in magic. For some, it’s that color change the mirror in your room has seen more times than any human being on Earth—but that you still feel you need to keep practicing just a little more. For others, it’s “magician-fooler” routines.

Often these guilty pleasures are method-driven, a kind of secret satisfaction we get from knowing that, after years spent riffling cards at the top to take a break, we can now do a pinky count.

For some magicians, another huge guilty pleasure lies in mathematical principles.

Recently, we stumbled upon a principle that is almost completely unknown—so unknown, in fact, that on Conjuring Archive it shows up fewer than thirty times across all the catalogued magic books.

The principle is so unusual, and yet so extraordinary, that we couldn’t let it slip by. It allows you to perform routines that would normally require a stack—without using one. You can use a shuffled, borrowed deck, and it doesn’t even need to be complete.

There’s only one problem: it doesn’t work every time. And in the end, that’s what makes it even more extraordinary.

Does It Work?

Using a mathematical principle in magic is a bit like trying to fix a broken relationship. It may go amazingly well, but it's very easy to picture countless ways it may go terribly wrong.

Since at One Ahead we love providing you with principles and ideas you won’t find anywhere else, this is a principle you really won’t find anywhere else—because the method doesn’t technically work all the time. It works most of the time. And that makes it terribly exciting.

A method like this has never been deeply developed into a routine precisely because it doesn’t work 100% of the time. At best, it works about 94% of the time—and while that’s an incredibly high percentage, any magic company would get flooded with bad reviews for releasing it.

Here, though, we’re confident you’ll recognise the brilliance of the method and feel the urge to try it today.

We’ll modernise the traditional idea behind this principle and wrap it in a card trick you can try right after reading—at your own risk.

Performance

The performer takes a borrowed deck and asks the spectator to shuffle it freely. The cards are then spread face up on the table, and the magician announces that he will attempt to memorise them.

After looking for a few seconds, the magician squares the deck and hands it to the spectator; but before doing so, writes down a prediction on a slip of paper.

The experiment begins: the spectator deals the cards and stops whenever they want. The card they stop at is turned over: it’s a 5. From there, the spectator deals five cards, lands on another card with a different value, counts that number down, and so on—card after card—creating a chain that quickly carries them towards the bottom of the deck.

Eventually, the spectator will reach a card whose value exceeds the number of cards remaining. At that point, the chain ends. The performer reminds everyone of the conditions: the deck was shuffled, everything started from a freely chosen position, and from then on everything happened in the spectator’s hands.

A shuffled deck contains countless possible combinations. And yet, the final card of the chain was predicted by the magician, who now reveals the prediction.