talkmagic.co.uk

Whilst titting about with cards and some friends, I improvised the following.

With a deck sorted into red-black order, cut the cards so that you have the first quarter red, the middle half black, and the final quarter red. Spread the cards and have someone take a card from the black section. While they look at and remember their card, either openly cut the cards or pass them such that the middle half is now red and the first and last quarters are black. Have the selection placed amongst the red cards.

Here's the fun part. Set the cards down, and fix your gaze upon your participant.

Say "This is a black card, isn't it?"

They will concur.

Say "It's not a spade is it?"

They will either say it is, to which you say "I thought so!" or they will say it is not, to which you say "I didn't think so." (chiz chiz.)

Then say "Aha! I have it!"

Quickly thumb through the deck to find the single black card in the run of reds. Place this card face down in front of the spectator. Ask them to name their card, then turn the card over.


Using the red black order to identify a selection is as old as the hills. What I like about this is the change of moment. You seemingly narrow down to the suit, and identify the card without ever going near the deck. The only apparent need to go through the cards is in order to find the selection for the reveal.

Great stuff.

Equally, I love Pass at Red by Roy Walton which in method bares similarity.

Great stuff especially for an inprov. situation. It's easy to arrange too as I'd use Lennart Green's angle seperation. I guess if you where able to, you could arrange the black cards in order and so when you pass or cut the deck, if you did it at the point in which they selected their card, you could tell what their seletion is by the next card, that way you would only need to act the reveal rather than fishing for it, plus getting it amazingly accurate.

I'll often have a deck in stack order, so do card divinations quite frequently based on cutting the deck at the selection and getting a peek of the face card. Tend in those situations to leave the card with the spectator, which is logically motivated for a mind-reading style presentation, and stops them assuming that I've somehow seen or otherwise manipulated their selection. The joy of these divinations is that it tends to lull people into expecting a card location effect - they end up with something much more paired down and, to that end, inexplicable. Especially if you lead into this with a few Fishman false overhand shuffles.

As far as the above effect goes, I'm drawn to it for its ease of set up, using the Green angle separation, as you say.