Usually a performer is serious about finding a card in front of an audience, but in this case I have departed from that rule. After working it out and trying it under actual conditions, I found that people still took it seriously! And, best of all, it always gets appreciation for some intangible reason, possibly because it appears like a lunatic’s method, YET WORKS!
It can be worked by two methods. I prefer the first because it is cleaner. Use your own deck and have 13 or 14 duplicate cards to match. In your left coat pocket put the same number of indifferent cards taken from the deck, and put the packet of duplicates on the bottom with another card below to mask. We will assume the duplicate packet to consist of Fives of Clubs. Have the Nine of Hearts, Six of Diamonds and Two of Spades in the top portion of the deck and pencil dot their upper left and lower right corners so as to quickly locate them in a fan. As it will be seen, these card combinations may be changed at will by the performer.
State that you played at an asylum and after the show was approached by an inmate who wanted to show you a card trick. This is it. The person said that rather than discover a card by skill and dexterity, he had learned to use his brain. You now ask the spectator assisting to cut off and retain about half of the deck. You pick up your half, and illustrate that he is to fan his cards facing him, and that you will reach over and draw several cards at random. You do this, throwing them face down each time, without looking at or showing them. You pick three in this manner, and it isn’t by chance or coincidence that you take the three dotted ones!
Now you fan your own packet so that the duplicate cards make a wide fan and offer the spectator a choice of one which he is to place in his pocket without learning its identity. At this time you drop your packet into the left coat pocket standing it beside the mixed cards already there, laying on their sides. Picking up the three cards you picked you explain that this was how the lunatic knew the card selected by the spectator. Turn them faces towards the audience and say “We take the highest card, which in this case is a Nine, and from it subtract the next highest which is a Six. That leaves Three. To that remainder we add the lowest card which is a Two. Three and Two is Five. Therefore the card is a Five spot. Now we look at the three cards and find a Heart, a Diamond and a Spade. Clubs is the missing suit, so the card must be a Club. In short, by simple figuring 34 the selected card is the Five of Clubs. Will you show it, sir?”
After the card is shown to be the right one, you can bring from your pocket the mixed cards and throw them on the table. Say “That was what I was shown, and it’s my opinion that anyone who can make a thing like that work shouldn’t be locked up.”
An alternate method is to dot the cards in the spectator’s half in the same manner, but fan force the single card from your half. This requires no duplicates but is not as fair looking and clean cut as the other. The effect is quite different.
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