Impossible Card Trick (Tutorial)

For this trick, I'm gonna ask Vinny to take some number of cards off the top of this deck, and it's up to you how many, but I'd say keep it between one and 15 cards. All right, so you grab some random number of cards off the top of the deck, keep track of how many there are, and you're gonna hide these cards somewhere. Just sit on them, or just put them somewhere I can't see, because I don't wanna know how many cards you took. I'm gonna look away while you do this part, by the way. Now, whatever number of cards you take away, I want you to look the same number of cards into the deck, and then look at that card, show it to the audience, put those cards back on top of the deck. Then it's important, you wanna square it up so I can't turn around and see exactly where it was or anything like that, and then let me know I can look back. All right? All right, so let's just shuffle these, we'll mix them up a little bit, and I'm gonna look away, you go ahead and do it. ♪♪♪ Okay, so now I don't know how many cards you took away from this deck, and I don't know which card you looked at. I could grab some cards off the top of the deck, just a random number, and look at these cards, and then I'd probably be able to guess that's one of your cards, but I don't wanna look at the cards, right, because that'd be too easy for me to figure it out. I'm gonna put a bunch of cards on the bottom, we'll give it a little bit of shuffle. What I wanna do is just lose your card in there, and just try to get a feel for where I think it might be. So I have a feeling your card is in the 35th position. So I'm gonna count down 35 cards, and we'll see if your card is there. That's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35. Now for the first time, what card were you thinking of? The king of clubs. What's great about this trick is that it can be done with a shuffle deck of cards, and it is almost completely self-working. So the parts of this that you need to remember is that you have to tell the spectator, take some number of cards off the top, I usually say between one and 15 cards, because it'll still work if they took 50 cards or 30 cards, but the trick will take forever, and it'll be a little more confusing. But if they do it between one and 15 cards, it just makes a lot more sense. So they take some batch off, let's say they took four cards off, they'd hide these in their pocket or somewhere else, and they'd look at the one, two, three, the fourth card, and they'd memorize that card. So in this case, the queen of hearts. I don't need to know how many cards are here or how many cards took away, but what I do know is that their card is always gonna be in the 50-second position, and it's gonna count through 52 cards. It's always gonna bring me back to that card. I'm gonna show you why in a minute. So in this case, there were not 52 cards left here because I took four away. So what you do at the beginning of the trick is count off some number of cards, but make sure you know how many in your head, and you put them at the bottom. So it's the same as if you counted those cards but started over in the deck. So I'll give you an example. If I took 10 cards off, and I would just do this naturally, I'd say, look, I'm gonna grab some batch of cards. I'm just counting. I have three and then two with five. I grab another three, another two. While I'm talking, I would do this. And in my head, I know I have 10 cards here now. So I put those in the bottom. So now I know I have to count 42 cards, not 52 cards anymore. You can do this with any number you want. So if I was still talking, I could grab another five cards. I grab another five cards too while I'm talking. And now I know their card's in the 30-second position. I'm just taking the number away from 52. So since I put 20 cards in the bottom, their card's gonna be in the 30-second position. It just has to be. And that's where the math comes in. So let's just make sure it is. 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32, 32. Here's why the math works. So let's say we just told them to memorize the bottom card of a full deck of 52 cards. In this case, the six of spades. And then you just pick the cards up and you said, your card's in the 50-second position. And you counted the 52 cards, you'd of course end on the last part of the deck. It wouldn't be very impressive, but that's the math behind this. So now let's say you do the same thing, except they take one card away and they put this one in their pocket. So then they would look at the first card, because it's one. They memorize this card. And now you're gonna count 52 cards again. But when you get to 51 cards, you're gonna run out of cards. You'd have to start over again and get to the top to get to 52 to bring you to this card. So to make that a little less confusing, you put some number of cards on the bottom. Let's say I would count off, let's say five cards here. I put those underneath. Now I take 52 minus five, so I'd have 47. And it's gonna be in the 47th position. And of course it's gonna be there. I just put it there. So with zero cards or one card, it's kind of easy to figure out how this trick works. But as you get to higher numbers, let's say they picked six cards. So they pick six cards off the deck, put those aside, put them in their pocket or whatever. And then they're gonna count six cards in. It gets a little more confusing to the spectator, but their card is there. If I put this back on top and I counted 52 cards, it would have to go through all these cards, wrap around and get back to the sixth card, because I took six cards away to get to the same card. So it really doesn't matter what number they pick. It's always gonna work. Now what you should do when you plan to do this trick is know in your head before you even start how many cards you're gonna move to the bottom. And when you saw the demonstration before, I took 15 cards off. That's what I always do. Because I know that I can talk and grab three and then two, and then three and then two, and then three and then two again while I'm talking and say, look, I'm just gonna put a batch of cards on the bottom. I know I put 15 cards on the bottom. I know their card is gonna be 52 minus 15 in the 37th position. And then one other thing that I always do to make it look like the cards are shuffled is I add two more cards to the bottom by making it look like a shuffle. And all I'm doing is peeling off one, two, throwing the rest on top. So it looks like the cards are completely mixed up. And now I know the card's in the 35th position.