The Twenty-One Magic Card Trick Explained

Video Transcript

" Hi everybody! This is Malik the magic guy for expertvillage.com. Now let’s learn the 21 card trick. Now this is a classic trick; everybody’s creepy uncle knows it and does it at a family barbecue. What you want is 3 piles of 7 cards. I just dealt them out already but you can just deal out 3 piles of 7 cards and basically the trick works itself so we are going to have Mr. Hand pick a pile. Alright, he is going to pick this one. Now we are going to have him think of a card and you can point to it. He’s thinking of the 7 of Spades. This is important. You want to put the pile with their card in-between the other 2. That is one of the only things you have to remember for the trick. Now we are going to deal the cards out again. We are going to go 1,2,3; you have to deal the cards this way for the trick to work and you want to make sure you deal them without changing their order. Now we are just going to pick up a pile and ask Mr. Hand if the card is there and in this case, it is not, so we are going to put that pile down. We are going to look here, the card’s not there either, that’s okay. So we know it is here but we show them anyway. There is the 7 of Spades right there. Now we are going to put the pile with his card in the middle of the other 2 again and we are going to deal out one more time. Basically Mr. Hand wants to see his card 3 times or we want him to see his card 3 times including the time he picked it. I usually go for the middle pile first all the time. We will show him, nope it’s not there. Okay. We’ll show again. Okay, it’s in that pile so we are going to put it between the other 2 and now once he has see his card 3 times, he’s picked it, seen it once in a pile, see it again in a pile, now it is automatically going to be the 11th card down. So we count 10 cards, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and10. We deal the next card and it is the 7 of Spades. We’ll deal it face down. You can keep going; you can act it up a little bit. You can change your mind if you want with a few cards to make it look like it is really difficult and then there is Mr. Hands, 7 of Spades. It works by itself. Cool mathematical trick, the 21 card trick. "