It could be a ringer but the main evidence against that is every time you do the trick the number of people who could possibly spill the beans multiples and no one has yet spilled the beans.
Quoth becky2844:
It’s hard to tell from such a brief and un-detailed description, but it sounds like this was just a multiple-outs trick. The magician prepares 52 different possibilities-- He’ll write one card on the bottom of his shoe, and tape another one to the bottom of a chair, and put another one in each of his pockets, and so on. Then, when the volunteer says “Jack of diamonds”, he just has to remember “Jack of Diamonds-- Let’s see, that’s the one I stuck in my hat”, or whatever, and produce it.
Or, of course, it could have been sleight of hand (palm the appropriate card, and then appear to pull it out from wherever), or a myriad of other methods. One of the first rules of figuring out magic tricks is that what you remember seeing isn’t actually what you saw, and another of the rules is that for any given trick, there are dozens or hundreds of different ways to do it (especially when combined with the previous effect-- A lot of people won’t remember any more details to the trick than “It was the pick-a-card trick”).
And to bring this back to the OP: When a magician says that he doesn’t know how another magician did a trick, that doesn’t mean that he can’t figure out how to do it. Even just the amateurs in this thread have so far figured out at least three different ways to do it. When a magician says something like that, it’s because there are multiple ways to do the trick, and he doesn’t know which specific method was used. It’s quite possible, in fact, that the same magician will do the “same trick” different times using different methods, to make it harder to figure out.
After reading that Cracked article earlier this week I googled around and after reading a few hours these are the most likely ones
http://www.learnmagictricks.org/forum/showthread.php?t=22710
http://www.learnmagictricks.org/forum/showthread.php?t=29754&page=2
also the guy is really, really good at cutting a deck to a card he wants.
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has stacked deck or two with him at all times
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waits for right moment. if not don’t do it.
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???
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profit!
I attended a company party where the boss had rented a pub and had hired a professional magician to wander around doing card tricks. The magician stood right beside me and did a trick on the bar twice. Each time I was no more than 2 feet from the deck of cards watching intently. Neither time could I pick up his little trick. The dude was good and I would have believed he possessed some supernatural power, however, not believing in magic, I assume he merely outsmarted with his hands.
I assume the same thing happens here. Since he did not shuffle the deck, the answer seems to be in a stacked deck.
And from that same show…
Michael Vincent has failed to fool them twice, but I have got to say that this man has absolutely tremendous stage presence and incredible skills:
I must confess that I can’t understand what you are saying. Are you saying that the audience thought, “Aha, I knew it! It’s not sleight of hand, he is mentally controlling people!”??
Seriously?
Or worse, having a woman who was previously sawn in half concealed in the table.
Magicians do occasionally use “ringers” (or “stooges” in the jargon of the profession), but it is part of the culture of magic that performers who rely on this are held in contempt by other magicians. It is a sign that you are a talentless hack. An effect achieved using a stooge may impress your audience, but it will not impress your fellow magicians (who can generally tell what is going on), and most magicians avoid using stooges for this reason. (Also, of course, they have to be paid, and cannot be relied upon to keep your secrets.) Berglas is clearly very highly respected by his fellow magicians. If any of them seriously believed that he was using a stooge to achieve his most famous effect, that would not be the case.
From the links other people have provided, it would appear that one of the key secrets of this effect is that Berglas rarely performs it, and never announces he is going to do it in advance. Thus, assuming that he is using a stacked and memorized deck (techniques for memorizing an apparently randomized deck certainly exist) if the right card and number combination do not come up, he can quickly segue into some other quite different effect (e.g. finding the relevant card some other way) that will still impress the audience, but will not baffle other magicians quite so much. This sort of skill at changing direction seamlessly in the middle of a performance certainly is the sort of skill that other magicians would very much respect.
I am not, incidentally, saying that he only produces this effect on the one lucky occasion out of 52 that someone just happens to name the right number for the chosen card. (RobotArm is, I think, correct to say that the odds for this effect occurring by pure chance are one in 52, although many people will mistakenly assume, as I did at first, the much more impressive odds of one in 52^2 .) I am sure there is more to it than that, and part of it (but probably not the whole) may lie in knowing which cards and which numbers are most commonly selected. For instance, I have heard that people asked to name a number between one and twenty (I do not know about one and 52) most commonly choose 17, and they are very unlikely to choose some of the other numbers, such as one or ten. There are probably also certain cards that get chosen much more often than others. That sort of knowledge can certainly improve the odds greatly (and the deck will be stacked accordingly). He may also have subtle, psychological ways, in his patter, of influencing people’s choices of both card and number, of choosing people likely to choose a common card or number, and particularly of influencing whether they count the cards from the top or the bottom, whether they look at the last card of the count, or the card after the end of the count, and things like that. My guess would be that if he wants them to count from the top, he offers them the choice - most people will still opt to go from the top - but if he wants them to count from the bottom, he just tells them to do so, and also just tells them whether to look at the last card of the count, or the next one after the count. All these sorts of factors can improve the chance of a “lucky” hit to much better than one in 52.
Which is pretty much how Criss Angel does it.
No, I’m saying the audience thought “Aha, I knew it! It’s not sleight of hand, it’s subtly misquoting what the chooser said in order to get the card he wants!”. As did I, for a second. When a magician does something as clumsy and easily spotted as that, and gets pulled up on it right away, the one thing you can be sure of is that the real shtick is something else entirely.