I have seen a couple of magicians do this mentalist trick, and I’d like to know how it is done:
The magician has 3 - 5 people in the audience choose in their minds a card from a standard playing deck - so 52 choices. The people are told not to respond in any way. Then the magician talks out loud asking questions about the card: i.e., “I need to decide if it is a red or black card”. “It could be a high card or a low card”. “How high is the card”. etc.
After several of these questions, the magician then says, “I’ve got your card” and tells what it is.
Most of the time the magician is right. In 2 occasions, I saw one magician get 4 out of 4 correct, and another one get 4 out of 5.
These people are not plants in the audience. I’ve known some of the people who were chosen. The magician must be getting clues from the people’s unconscious reactions somehow.
Does anyone know how it is done, and what clues they see?
52 is between 32 (2 to the fifth) and 64 (2 to the sixth) so at most 6 well-chosen questions will determine the card. It’s hard not to react at all to a question, so a minor nod, headshake, exhale, widening of the eyes, etc. could give away an answer. And I suspect that a magician will be aware of which cards are most likely to be chosen “at random” by a typical person (people are not going to really pick at random), so that’s going to reduce the number of answers required a bit too.
When asked to name a card, over half of the people chose one of four cards: the Ace of Spades (25%), or the Queen (14%), Ace (6%), or King (6%) of Hearts. If you’re like most people, you may have chosen one of these cards when asked at the beginning of this article. (A full list of cards and their frequencies is also available.)
But when asked to visualize a card, people seemed to choose the Ace of Hearts more often. In our sample, they chose it almost twice as often when asked to visualize (11%) rather than name (6%) a card.
Yeah, it would be particularly interesting to see what the right answers have been. If they’ve been random cards like the six of diamonds, that’d be more impressive than if it were any of the ones mentioned in the link above.
Also, there’s the like of Max Maven’s old “four-sided triangle” trick: even if you remember it right, there never was anything for you to hear and get clued in by; it’s only the person choosing the card who hears something different…
The “not respond in any way” sounds like misdirection. You say that so people remember it. Before you say that, you say something like, “And write it down,” or “Tell your neighbor,” or otherwise record it. That’s where the trick is done.
Or not, but done in some other way that you forget.
I’m far from even an amateur magician, but I know barely enough to teach an after school magic trick club. My first lesson is this: do the trick when the audience isn’t paying attention, and get them to pay attention when you’re not doing the trick. If you’re trying to understand how a trick is done based on memory, there’s a very high chance you’re not remembering the moment when the trick was done.
Yeah, you really need to see a video of the performance to see how it’s done. The magician will do certain things that make it seem like you had a free choice and you will remember it that way but he has control over it. Example if there were and object A and B and they wanted you to end up with object A they may say something like “Pick up either object…” and if you take object A continue with “…and that’s yours”. If you take object B continue with “… and give it to anyone else but yourself.” Afterwards you remember and tell people “he let me freely choose the object”.
