Tweak-End: John Bannon's Sort of Psychic

Four years ago, I reviewed John Bannon’s Move Zero DVD and wrote the following:

My favorite trick in this volume is Sort of Psychic. A spectator shuffles the deck. The magician gives her about a third of the deck to look at and think of any card. She never names it, it truly exists only in her mind. There is a little test of psychic power that happens now where you mix up the cards and she tries to guess three times which half of the packet her card is in. (The magician never looks at the faces of the cards.) Then the full deck is assembled and shuffled by the magician. Now, you ask her to cut anywhere and she cuts exactly to her freely chosen mental selection which she’s never named up to that point.

In the years since writing that, I’ve made a little tweak to the handling which I feel boosts the power of an already good trick. (You’ll have to know the trick for this post to really make any sense.)

The first thing I do is that I remove the Aces from the deck and keep them in my pocket. You could actually do this openly (if you were doing the trick completely impromptu). But it’s usually something I do before the trick and don’t mention it.

I give the deck to the person I’m with and ask them to shuffle it as much as they want and to think of any card in the deck, (“Except the aces, because they’re so common.”)

I split the deck into three equal piles. I have her see if she can psychically identify which pile contains her card. Whether she’s right or wrong, we eventually find the pile that does. And from there I go into the trick as John originally describes it. (If you’re not familiar with the trick, this added step fits in perfectly with the premise of the effect.)

So the difference is, rather than the magician pulling out 16 cards and having the spectator think of one of those cards, the spectator is free to think of any card in the deck that they want. Eventually you do get to the point where they’re thinking of one of 16 cards, but from their perspective they had a free mental selection of any card at all and the whole deck is in play.

Starting the trick with such total freedom adds quite a bit to the effect. It’s not, “You thought of any card from this packet.” It’s, “You thought of any card in the deck. You never spoke its name. You never touched it or removed it. It exists only in your mind.”

[Note: If you were doing it totally impromptu you would remove the aces openly and say. “I’m going to have you think of any card in the deck. But I’m going to take the Aces out of play because they’re too commonly thought of.” And just set them aside.]