How to Make Decisions
Issue 27

We welcome your letters, questions and desperate pleas for help in this uncaring world. As always, e-mail WBXylo at Gmail.com.

How to Perform Card Tricks

First a couple of things that I gleaned from the teachings of Penn Jillette. A: stage magic is tricky. It is trying to get away with lying, when everybody knows that you are lying. B: Chicks don’t dig magicians; this shit won’t get you laid.

So, let’s go over the bare bones of a relatively simple card trick. It requires no special skill, no real dexterity, nor poker face. It just requires enough memory to remember this thing:

Jackass ate live trees
King intends to fix
several for benign queen.

This gives you an order in which to sort the cards, namely, Jack, Ace, 8, 5, 3, King, 10, 2, 6, 7, 4, 9 Queen.

Since there are 52 cards in a deck (and not 13), we need to remember one more thing to sort. Chased. Perhaps it would be better to write CHaSeD. Clubs, Hearts, Spades, Diamonds.

Put these two sequences together, and you not only get an order that looks random, it also has a pleasing red, black, red, black pattern.

This pattern is all the trick one needs. By virtue of knowing one card, you know the previous and the next. If you have the Ace of spades (the death card ooh scary) what comes next?

You know it is going to be an 8 because of the silly rhyme. And you know it will be a diamond because of Chased.

How do you transfer this pattern into a trick? Many ways really. Make sure you sort your deck ahead of time. Then find your mark.

Have your victim cut the deck. (A cut provides the illusion that the order has changed; it hasn’t. Trust me)

Now fan the cards and have your victim pick a card without showing you. Note where the card was drawn. When “unfanning” the deck, make sure that spot is on the bottom. (Normally, you can hide this move by virtue of clumsiness. It’s hard to put 51 cards back together anyway.)

All you need now is to see the card on the bottom of the deck to know which card is in your victim’s hand. This is where you might want to throw in some misdirection. Whatever you want really. You might want to pretend to smell the deck to see which card is missing. Or it is easy to take a peak when moving the deck up to your ear to “listen to the cards” as they tell you which one is missing. If the bottom card is a face card, you might want to just have say the “king of hearts” tell you that the 10 of spades is missing from His Majesty’s Deck.

Random Joke of the Week

Academics find this one funny.

A Physicist, a Biologist, and a Mathematician are all drinking coffee at an outdoor café. They are all telling random stories while staring at this empty building across the street. They argue about the virtues of their respective disciplines when they see two people enter the empty building.

Some time passes and they see 3 people leave the building. They are naturally a little confused.

The Physicist ponders for a couple of seconds, finally coming up with, “Our data must have been wrong.”

The Biologist ponders a little bit longer than this. He finally decides, “They must have reproduced.”

The Mathematician thinks about this longest of all. He ponders and ponders. Finally, he says, “If one more person enters that building, it will once again be empty!”

This week’s PUZZLE
What follows and why?

10, 6, 13, 1, 13, 10, 10, 1, …

Last 5 posts by ML Kennedy

• How to Make Decisions (72) - June 19th, 2007
• How to Make Decisions (71) - June 12th, 2007
• How To Make Decisions (70) - June 5th, 2007
• How to Make Decisions (69) - May 29th, 2007
• How to Make Decisions (68) - May 21st, 2007