Symbol Pattern Square II
by Werner Miller

Werner Miller is a retired teacher of mathematics, whose hobbies are recreational mathematics and magic. A magical inventor and writer, Werner has produced a prolific volume of work, mostly what he calls “semi-automatic” card tricks based on mathematical principles. He is the author of "Fast von selbst", "Alles Miller oder was", "Ratatouille", more than 300 trick contributions to various magazines and web sites and more than 30 related computer programs. In addition, Werner is also a staff member of the German magazine "Magische Welt", a columnist for the British magazine "The Magician", and regular contributor here at Visions. Werner's first English-language book, Ear-Marked, is available here.

You may even have two spectators involved. Each of them gives the deck a complete cut. Raise the deck so that spec #2 can see the face of the bottom card, and place this card face down into the last box of the grid (lower right corner). Slide off the top card, show it to spec #1, and place it into the first box of the grid (upper left corner).

False cut the deck, then deal the cards singly into the empty boxes of the grid using slightly modified moves (i):
knight's move (red arrows): two boxes to the left / one box up; blocked move (blue arrow): one box to the right, one box down.

Four knight's moves are always followed by one blocked move.

Think of spec's #1 card as "1", count silently up to 24, and do a knight's move when the number is not divisible by 5 and a blocked move when the number is a multiple of 5 (j).

Turn over the four cards lying on the same broken diagonal as spec's #1 card -- their symbols match (e.g. Circles). Ask spec #1 to turn his card face up -- also a Circle (k).

Turn over the four cards lying on the same broken diagonal as spec's #2 card -- their symbols match (e.g. Stars). Ask spec #2 to turn his card face up -- also a Star (l).

At last, turn all the other cards face up, too (m).

Addendum
There are still more methods to produce pretty symbol patterns with cyclically stacked ESP cards. Try e.g. these ideas:

Place the top card into the center box. Deal the remaining 24 cards back and forth into two packets, drop the right packet onto the left packet (the original bottom card is now atop). Deal the cards row by row from
left to right into the empty boxes of the grid (n).

Or: Place the top card into the 4th box of the second row, the next card into the second box of the 4th row. Deal the remaining 23 cards rotationally into three packets. Put the middle packet on top of the last one, then both on top of the first one. Deal the cards row by row from left to right into the empty boxes of the grid (o).

Both methods produce the same pattern: When turning the cards face up, you get five columns of matching symbols (p).

Werner Miller