Eight Threatening Kings

Effect: Person chooses card from deck, and magician tells person the suit and number.

Set-up: The deck is stacked. To remember its sequence of values, memorize the rhyme “Eight Kings Threatened To Save Ninety-Five Queens For One Sick Knave.” The words stand for the card values 8, K, 3, 10, 2, 7, 9, 5, Q, 4, A, 6, J. (“Threatened” = 3 & 10.) To remember the sequence of suits, memorize the word “CHaSeD.” Its consonants C, H, S and D stand for Clubs, Hearts, Spades, Diamonds. Arrange the deck so that its values and suits follow these sequences over and over. For example, the top five cards are 8-Clubs, K-Hearts, 3-Spades, 10-Diamonds, 2-Clubs, and so on.

Method**:** Hold the deck and have someone select and remove any card. As he (or she) is looking at the card, cut the deck at the point where he removed it and put the top cards on the bottom. Glimpse the new bottom card. Find the word that corresponds to its value in the memorized rhyme. If the bottom card is, say, the 4 of Hearts, the word that corresponds to 4 is “for.” The word following “for” in the rhyme is “one,” which stands for the Ace. Next, find the bottom card’s suit in the word “CHaSeD.” It’s H. The consonant after H in the word is S, for Spades. So the person’s card is the Ace of spades.