Cards

Zener cards were designed to be used in scientific experiments to attempt to prove the existence of ESP. In the initial experiments, subjects were able to correctly identify the hidden card at rates greater than expected by chance, but further analysis have revealed many possible ways that information could have been exposed such as body language or simply imperfections on the backs of the cards.

I’m much more interested in the ways that people can surreptitiously pass information. This is the main presentation I use for an ESP matching routine. I frame the effect as trying to pass information to and from the volunteer without letting the rest of audience know. It’s fun for everyone watching the volunteer make funny faces rather than the standard routine where the volunteer tries to avoid getting their mind read.

I’ve been practicing my tabled faro recently. I don’t have any routines in any of my shows that require it so this is just for fun. I realized I’ve been doing it “wrong” by basically treating it as a regular faro but sideways on the table instead of keeping the top cards separate.

Craig Petty’s Atomic Deck released recently and there’s lots of hype and complaints. The product is an ACAAN effect. A big negative that people identified with the release is that it requires a phone. The flagship routine requires the spectator to go to a specific website to enter their choice of card and number. The website will then spit out a “percentage” which the magician needs complete the effect.

If you’re willing to require a phone, there’s a much easier way to achieve an ACAAN. Instead of having the website be some strange page that gives statistics about the likelihood of card-number combos, just have it be a random generator site. You can use the excuse that human’s are bad at generating true randomness. The spectator will be invited to go to the site and press a button that randomly chooses a card. The spectator is free to press this button as much as they like. Then once satisfied, the spectator presses a different button to generate a number. The spectator can even generate multiple numbers. The secret of course being that the numbers will exactly match the index in one of the stacks you’ve prepared.

Last week I discussed the probabilities of three effects: ACAAN, Triumph, and sympathetic Rubik’s cube. The Out of this World effect slipped my mind last week so I’ll mention it today.

We’ll use magicpedia for the definition of the effect.

A spectator separates a deck of cards into reds and blacks without looking at the faces of the cards.

Unlike facing, card color is not independent. There are only 52 cards in a deck so if you know the color of the first 51, you can determine the color of the last card with total accuracy.

The ACAAN effect has a \(\frac{1}{52}\) chance of happening by coincidence. Some magicians try to hype up the effect by emphasizing the fact that there are \(52\) possible cards and \(52\) possible positions and imply the probability is \(\frac{1}{52} \cdot \frac{1}{52} = \frac{1}{2704}\) but this isn’t correct.

To see why, let’s start by considering randomly chosen card \(C\) and randomly chosen position \(i\). Assuming a full, standard deck and valid card and index choices, the chance of card \(C\) being somewhere in the deck is exactly \(1\). The card must be at one of the 52 locations. That is

Some of the back designs from the cards I bought to make Dazzle gimmicks are really nifty. Its quite a shame that a lot of those cards simply don’t have the right texture for a lot of magic tricks.

This photo doesn’t accurately capture the look of the shiny ink on certain cards. The quality of the ink really elevates the look of the airplane deck. The ink on the Desert Inn card is a lot more gold in person and pairs nicely with the green.

I recently bought a bunch of playing cards to make my own gimmicks for Alex Elmseley’s Dazzle. It was harder than I thought.

Some playing cards are straight up impossible to split cleanly. The printed layer is too thin and will simply rip instead of separate from the middle layer. I’ve been forced to just glue them together and suffer the extra thickness.

Some playing cards can only be split from one side. I guess they use different papers on the face and back. One side will to be easy to grab and pull and the other will just rip.