The Mystery of Magic’s Greatest Card Trick | Hacker News Reader

The Mystery of Magic’s Greatest Card Trick

nytimes.com

47 pointsmistersquid20 comments

Seems like one way to do the trick would be the following: Choose some pre-determined sequence of the cards and memorize it. Buy 52 decks of cards, and put them all in that same sequence, but shifted by various offsets, ranging from 0 to 51. Then hide all the decks in various places. Now when someone names a card and a number, you just need to figure out which deck is shifted by the right amount to put that card in that position and point them to the corresponding deck.

Anyone see any obvious flaws in this approach?

The main flaw is practicality. The first thing you could do is cut it down to 26 decks, all you need to do then is have the participant count off the top with the face up instead of the bottom to replicate the other 26.

Then if you allow “off by one” or 2, or 3, you can shrink it down further.

Fits with the Teller quote about magic: "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect"

If I can name any card and any position don't you need 52 ^ 2 decks? Or at least that many divided by 2 for counting off the top or bottom.

If you want to frame it that way, then each physical deck can handle 52 distinct queries. So you have 52^2 / 52 = 52 decks required.

No, because a single deck can answer for 52 queries. and 52 decks (offset 0-51) will be sufficient for any card and number combo

Oh, I see. For what it's worth, here is someone else performing the trick and it doesn't look like that's what's happening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdXIVQ-asqU

It still requires memorising the positions of 52^2 cards though.

No, because all decks have the same order (just rotated).

Thanks for this. Just want to add, the "off by up to two" seems like a hedge for the author having his pick of three decks. Berglas couldn't remember or describe succinctly enough which of the three decks had the named card at the named index, but knew any of the three would be close.

Some random but perhaps interesting things to know about this trick from my perspective as a magician. I made my full-time living as a performing magician in my 20s for several years including touring until I got into tech which paid better (even though I made good money for a magician). Since then magic has been a hobby. Like many things, it can be a better hobby than profession.

* Many magicians really enjoy ACAAN type tricks, however that doesn't mean it's a "good" trick from the perspective of non-magicians. Magicians find it fascinating because there's a huge variety of methods to achieve the effect. Some of these methods are extremely technical and some require very high proficiency in arcane card sleights. There are even entire books about different ways to achieve this one effect. At magic conferences there are occasionally seminar tracks with sessions just on ACAAN presented by various experts.

* From a non-magicians perspective, all the different methods will look essentially the same. A worse problem is that ACAAN fundamentally doesn't have a very engaging plot. It's basically a puzzle or challenge-style effect where nothing happens except watching someone turn over cards. Done well, it appears the magician didn't even do anything.

* The effects audiences love most are rarely the effects magicians love most and that goes both for watching them and performing them. A couple years ago I was in a closed teaching session for experienced magicians given by brilliant Spanish card technician Dani D'Ortiz. Dani did an ACAAN that absolutely smoked everyone in the room. It's really, really rare for an experienced magician to see any effect and not know how it's done (and usually 17 other ways it could be done as as the various trade-offs between them). At the end of the effect you could see the magicians making eye-contact with their friends with a raised eyebrow, and the answer being a subtle shake of the head. I did the same. I had no idea.

* However, that doesn't mean you would think what Dani did was a good trick. Dani carefully crafted that version of ACAAN just for fellow magicians. In all likelihood he doesn't even perform it for non-magicians because, thankfully, he's also a great entertainer and he knows it's not all that entertaining (though Dani could probably make watch code compile seem entertaining). What made it spectacular to magicians was that Dani structured the effect in such a way that all the typical methods for achieving it were apparently eliminated. Thus, he did something new, or at least did something old in a new way. And to magicians that's interesting. For a hardcore ACAAN-geek, adding one more way of achieving the effect to their existing mental inventory of dozens of other ways is one of the most interesting things in the world.

* On the TV show "Fool Us" featuring Penn & Teller, the magicians that 'win' haven't actually fooled the hosts (Teller is actually the magic historian more than Penn). Teller certainly knows several methods to achieve every effect ever presented on the show. The "winners" are the ones who craft their effect in such a way that it's hard for an expert observer to infer which method was used (and they may insert intentional red herrings). If Teller infers the incorrect method, then they technically "win", even though any of the possible methods would fool a non-magician equally well. There are other times the contest wins where P&T are just being generous and giving the win to a performer because the effect was creatively reimagined or just beautifully executed.

http://archive.is/qqtn9

Are there any leading theories as to how this trick is performed?

Quora answers claim the book referenced in the NYT article actually does contain info on the trick in question.

It sounds like your average magician stuff, influence, misdirection, memorization, skill and patter. The quora answer claims there are about six memorized decks, and that there are generally attempts to ‘force’ the right number after the the card has been selected. If the wrong number is chosen, there are ways to to mitigate the issue going all the way to manipulating the deck.

Getting angry was part of the trick, for sure.

https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-Berglas-Effect-magic-card...

A magician not performing when politely asked? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

I found a video so I could understand it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdXIVQ-asqU

There seem to be three people involved besides the magician.

  (1) the person who names a card
  (2) the person who names a position
  (3) the person who holds the deck and counts off the cards

I noticed that they state person (1) and person (2) are not stooges, but conspicuously don't say that about person (3).

But I'm tempted to go with those who say the secret is simply that they lie about (2) not being a stooge who knows the position of each card. That seems like the easiest way to do it.

If it really is a tremendously difficult trick that required years of training and so on, what's stopping someone else from doing it by just lying about the stooge?

When magicians talk about ACAAN it's assumed that the deal/count is done fairly by a spectator. Without that it would be considered a false count trick (of which there are of course many).

It's assumed?

They explicitly state the constraints for the video, which are that two out of three of the people specifically are not stooges.

That suggests that either the third person is a stooge, or that they want you to suspect the third person rather than the stooge so you will be more impressed when they don't do any sleight of hand.

Yes, as I said. If you can't have a spectator do the counting then I think most magicians wouldn't refer to it as ACAAN.

In your video the person counting is definitely not a stooge (he's a celebrity named Alistair McGowan).

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