How to do a Calculator Prediction Trick

Video Transcript

"Alright everybody. Let me tell you how to do the very cool 1089 prediction. Again, it's a very, very old principal and is used a lot in magic. I'm going to show you how to do it the basic way and then I'm going to show you another trick in a few minutes that uses it in a different way all together. Let's have Mr. Hand come back in. Basically, what you want to do is have them come up with a number where all 3...It's a 3 digit number. All 3 digits are different and you're going to have them write it here on the card. You want to leave room above it. So he's going to write down 479. Now you want to have them reverse the digits and get 974. Now, because 974 is bigger, we're going to write it on top because he's going to subtract 479 from 974 using the calculator. So he's going to 974 minute 479. He's going to hit the equals sign and he's going to get 495. Now, we're going to have him put a plus sign here and reverse it again so it's 594. Then he's going to add those. So he's going to take the 495 and add 594, and when he hits equals he's always going to come up with 1089. Now, it's possible that this difference when he subtracts it is going to be 99. What you do is you put a 0 after it and make it 990. Then you add 099, but because it's calculator you don't put the 0 in and you'll still end up with 1099. So you do 990 plus 99 and you'll get 1089. What I've done is as a cool little kind of presentation point, I wrote the prediction 6801, which is actually 1089 upside down. So I show them 6801. They say not that's wrong, and you go oh it looks right to me and it says 1089. That's one way to do the very cool 1089 production."