Infotainment Resource

This is a great up close card trick that is perfect for any audience. It requires some practice, and a little bit of preparation, but once you know how to do it, it's pretty simple. Of course, because it requires some set up, you can only perform this once. So it helps if you have a few other card tricks up your sleeve, so to speak. This works especially well for kids, both to perform for and to teach, as it doesn't require any difficult sleight of hand maneuvers.

This is how the caper will look to your amazed audience. You take three Aces: Spades, Clubs, and Diamonds. You spread them out, holding them to the audience. Then you set them on top of the deck, and rearrange and cut the deck a number of times, ensuring that they have been uniformly dispersed.

You then ask a helper to come up and search for the Ace of Diamonds. They will look in vain, as they won't be able to come across it. If you like, you can get an additional audience member to come up and search, but they too will be ineffective. Then you pull the Ace of Diamonds out of your shirt pocket. (Or your back pocket, or shoe, or wherever.)

Here's how to set the trick up. First discover all the Aces. Then put the Ace of Diamonds in your pocket (or shoe or wherever) beforehand. Then rest the other Aces on top of the deck. When you drag the three Aces off the top, and fan them out, make sure to hold the Ace of Hearts in the middle. If you place both other cards on either side of the Ace of Hearts, it will look like the Ace of Diamonds to the audience.

How you utterance this is important. If you bring up beforehand that you are going to make the Ace of Diamonds fade away, they will be looking much more closely. But if you just start of by describing what you are doing, and then name the three cards (Ace of Clubs, Spades, and Diamonds) they will likely trust you, and not search too closely at the three cards.

One way that can really help is as you are shuffling and cutting the deck, is to impart some long winded story about how diamonds have some kind of paranormal power, and in the old days when they were choosing the shapes for cards, they almost didn't choose diamonds because people were always stealing them, or they were always disappearing or something. That way, when they start wondering about the Ace of Diamonds, it will already be concealed someplace in the deck, or so they suppose. Have fun with this trick.