The Power of Lying
by Oli Foster

Oli Foster leads an exciting double life as an underwriter by day and magic enthusiast the rest of the time. Ahem. When he's not pretending card stacks are work-related, he enjoys collecting old magic books and working out superfluous mental card routines, like the one you're about to read...

One effect that captures the imagination is having a spectator correctly guess the identity of a face down card. The procedure allows little room for manoeuvre and one method that seems to have cropped up over the last couple of hundred years or so is a psychological force, followed by a switch if this ploy proves unsuccessful. I wanted to create a similar effect, without recourse to either and was amused to consider an approach that uses no more special ability than that of being able to keep a straight face whilst lying your pants off.

Effect: The magician invites the spectator to help him shuffle and cut the cards. While this is completed, he comments that this is normally done to randomise the order of the deck but, sometimes, by pure random chance, matching cards will end up shuffled together, so one might end up with, say, four of a kind, attracting the resultant comments that ‘the deck hasn’t been shuffled very well’..

In this case, it has, but the spectator is invited to imagine that she has indeed cut to four of a kind and to further guess at which four cards she might have cut to. The spectator names the four sixes. The four randomly cut cards are tabled face down without showing whether the spectator has guessed correctly. The magician removes two of the four cards and again has the spectator guess whether he’s removed the red cards or black cards. She guesses black. Finally, the magician removes one further card and has the spectator guess the suit of the one remaining card. She guesses clubs.

The magician recaps that the spectator cut to four cards from a shuffled deck and, herself, guessed the value (six) and suit (clubs) of the one card that’s been in sight throughout. Without any fuss or moves, this card is turned over and found to be the six of clubs.

Set-up: Remove the two to nine inclusive in a random mixture of suits and arrange these in numerical order. Place the first four cards of this stack (the two to five) on the face of the deck and the second four cards (the six to nine) on the top. You’re ready to begin.

Performance: Table the deck face down and ask a spectator to cut off about half the cards and place this half to one side. Riffle shuffle these two halves together, maintaining stock of the top and bottom four stacked cards. Ask the spectator to square the two interwoven halves and to again cut off about half the deck and place it to one side. By involving her in a shuffle that duplicates the subsequent cut, the whole process becomes less distinct and helps disguise what follows.

You’re about to complete a crossing the cut force, without drawing attention to it.. Pick up the bottom half, as you start to patter about shuffling being used to randomise the order of the deck. As you say this, place the bottom half on top of the packet the spectator has just cut off but, instead of placing it square on top, rest it slightly diagonally on the spectator’s packet, so that the two halves aren’t flush.

Continue that sometimes, by pure chance, matching cards can end up shuffled together, such as four of a kind and that this would be particularly useful if you could control these things in a card game and shuffle up aces and kings, but in reality, these matching cards tend to be more random. Ask the spectator to imagine that she has indeed cut to four matching cards and to name any random four of a kind of any number without being obvious.

This should eliminate the named aces and kings, as well as court cards from her selection, along with the tens which, for some reason, seem similarly obvious. The result will be that she will name one of the eight values that rest on either side of the marked cut. Above the cut are values two to five, followed by values six to nine beneath the cut, all in order.

If she names a value between two and five, pick up the top half and remove the four cards from its face. If she names a value between six and nine, pick up the top half and remove the four cards from the top of the tabled packet. Either will seem to be the four cards ‘randomly cut to’. Square up the rest of the deck, leaving the other four in the centre.

You’ve now removed what appear to be four random cards, one of which matches her named value, whereas she’s wondering how all of them could possibly be a match, given that she cut before guessing. You’re now going to force the suit of the card that matches her named value using equivoque, but, unlike the usual tell-tale pattern of “so you chose x, which leaves us with y”, you will seem to have her guess which cards you have removed, after you have removed them and will consistently confirm that you have indeed removed what she chose rather than what she didn’t.

You know the order of the four cards and whether the spectator’s value is in the left two cards or the right two. Pick up the two that contain the value and table the other two. Tell the spectator that, if she is right and she did indeed cut to the four sixes, two of them would be red and two of them would be black. When you say this, gesture to one of the two piles as you say ‘red’ and the other one as you say ‘black’, to semi-consiously establish which pile is which. In reality, both piles are of mixed colours but, on gesturing, indicate that the two you’re holding are both the colour of the spectator’s value. For example, if her chosen six is black, you’d subtly gesture to the cards your holding when you say ‘black’.

You now say that you’ll take two cards away and the spectator should guess whether these are the black cards or the red cards. This is worded carefully, rather than saying you’ll remove or get rid of two cards as, depending on what the spectator says, you will either say that the cards you’ve taken away are the two you’re now holding or the two you’ve left on the table. Because you’ve indicated the matching colour of the cards you’re holding, she’s likely to name this colour, black, to which you respond, ‘so we’ll take the black cards away, the clubs and spades.’ [gesturing to the cards you’re holding.] If she doesn’t, say ‘so, if this was real, taking the red cards away, [gesturing to the tabled cards] would leave us with the black cards, [gesturing to the cards you’re holding] the clubs and spades.’

‘Finally, I’m going to remove one of these two remaining cards, either the club or the spade.’ As you say this, remove the card that matches the spectator’s value, again, subtly indicating its suit. ‘Which card do you think I’m removing, the club or the spade?’ Repetition would normally make equivoque look transparent for its inconsistency but, here, it strengthens the illusion as, on both occasions, the spectator is being asked to guess which card/s you have already removed. Whatever she says, place the card of her named value face down in front of her and the other card on top of the other two, before placing all three on the deck and casually cutting them to the middle.

Now recap by saying that she imagined that the random cards she cut to were four sixes and that the last one remaining was a club, not just any club but the six of clubs. Of all 52 cards [ribbon spread the deck face up] she guessed just one [gesture to the tabled card] Ask her to turn over the card in front of her. Sometimes, imagination defies the constraints of probability.

Oli Foster