Si Stebbins Setup & the 27th Card

Video Transcript

" Hi! Malik the Magic Guy for expertvillage.com. Let me show you another cool trick to do with the Si Stebbins setup. So let’s take our deck give it a couple of quick cuts here, and let’s let Mr. Hand cut the deck as well, Mr. Hand is doing such a great job. Mr. Hand, do you want to cut the cards again? Wonderful…now let’s, just by looking at the deck here, I can tell you a few things about the 27th card of the deck. If I tell you the top card, the bottom card is way too easy, especially since I just looked at the bottom card, but the 27th card will be a red 6 the 6 of hearts. Let’s have a look: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, and the 27th card… a red 6, the 6 of hearts. Now let me quickly explain to you how I did that—I’m just going to put these in the correct order here. Now one thing about the Si Stebbins setup is, because of the way it goes, there’s 13 cards in a suit of cards. An interesting principle of the Si Stebbins setup is that every 13th card is the same value: so if 1 is 6, then 14 is a 6 that means 27 is a 6 and that means 13 from that at 41 would be another 6. So what I can do now is, when Mr. Hand cuts the deck, I can look at the bottom card, which is the 3 of spades. Now I had 3 to it to get a 6, and because they go clubs, hearts, spades, diamonds, I know that the top part of the deck is the 6 of diamonds. Now if you forget that, you can even lay these down, and have that spread out just a little bit so that you can see that’s the 6 of diamonds right there. That’s sort of the sneaky way to do that, but it’s better if you do it the other way in figuring out the top card is the 6 of diamonds. Now because the top one is the 6 of diamonds, I know that 27 cards away is going to be the other red 6, because they alternate in color every 13 cards. So 14 would be 6 of clubs, because it goes clubs, hearts, spades, diamonds, and 27 is the 6 of hearts. So if we count down 27 cards, you can tell them that. Now you can use variations of that to do other tricks, but I just wanted to teach you the principle that the cards are in groups of 13 apart from each other. So that’s the 27th card with the Si Stebbins principle."