The Clock Magic Card Trick Explained

Video Transcript

" Hi! Malik, the magic guy for expertvillage.com and now for the explanation of the clock trick. Now the first thing you want to do is you want to decide what cards you are going to predict. In my case, I picked the 4 of Diamonds and we are going to put that 13th from the bottom of the deck. The way we do that is count off 12 cards; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. We put these cards back. Then you are going to write yourself a prediction that says 4 of Diamonds. I am going to show you some other ways to do that a little later on. Put that aside for now. Now the trick pretty much happens by itself. You have them think of an hour of the day, anywhere from 1 to 12 and in our case Mr. Hand thought of 5, so he is going to take off 5 cards and he is going to put those in his pocket and we do this with our back turned and he puts them in his pocket so that I don’t see what the cards are. Now I am going to count off 12 cards to make a clock; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 and we want to deal them onto the table one at a time and not count them this way because we want the order of the cards to reverse when we do that. We put the rest of the cards away and then we are going to make a clock face starting with 1:00, so there’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 so that’s our clock face. Now this actually is cool because the trick works itself 2 ways. First I am going to tell them what hour of the day he thought. Because I know the 4 of Diamonds is my force card, it kind of works like a key card. We are going to talk about key cards later on but I just count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and I automatically know that he thought of 5:00 which he did. So I am going to say well I think that you thought of 5:00 because I am counting in my head. Then I am going to say let’s see what card falls on 5:00; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, it’s the 4 of Diamonds and that matches our prediction, the 4 of Diamonds."