This is a little trick (well sort of) that a friend of ours used to do for us. He would never tell us how it was done and we were quite impressed with his apparently gifted memory.

The trick – A deck with the 52 normal cards, has one card removed by the people observing the trick. The card is kept aside until the end. You then go through the pack twice (once normally and then once faster) and then tell them which card they took out.

See if you can do it…

If you want to have a look at the method I devised (which in hindsight is not so spectacular) read on…still it might look impressive to people who have never seen it before.

Ok, so assign each card an integer value – A=1, 2=2, 3=3… J=11, Q=12, K=13.
Each suit will now have a total value of 91 (which by 4 suits gives a total of 364)

Now given that adding to 364 might get a bit tedious (especially when people are talking to you), I decided to simply count through lots of 20. Everytime you reach 20 you revert it to 0 and carry on. For example 14+9 = 23–>3+ J = 14 + 7 = 21 –> 1 +… and so on…

You will revert to zero 17 times but that is unimportant as you are only interested in the remainder (364 –>24).
When you finish going through the pack the first time you should be left with a number between 11 and 23. This number subtracted from 24 will tell you which number card you have…(eg 16 = 8, 17 =7 …)

Once you know this number you can go through the second time rapidly to ascertain the suit and voila…

Btw – try not to look like your counting, and if you feel like you’re getting lost, just take a second to straighten the pile and relax…

If anyone else has a better method, feel free to post it…

(I imagine you could just count through lots of ten as well, however, this could lead to a double up of possibilities… eg 1, 2, 3 could be either 3/K, 2/Q, A/J. It just makes it slightly tougher in the second go through.