Impossible Card Location

Equipment needed: A pack of normal playing cards (no jokers)

Effect:

You try to lose 3 cards in the pack so that it would be impossible to find them without cheating, but by the process of elimination, you find all of them, at the same time.

Method:

1: Chose three members of the audience and ask them each to pick and remember a card after the pack has been shuffed normally.

2:Tell them that you are going to try and lose the cards forever. Make up some waffle to keep the audience occupied.

3: While talking, brush of 15 cards from the top of the pack and place them to your right. Remove another 15 cards and place them to the left of the first pile. Then remove the next 10 and place them next to the second pile so that you are left with 9 in your hand.

4: Name the piles A B C from left to right so that the pile with 10 is A.. O.K

5: Ask one of the assistants to place his card on pile A and then take a few cards from pile B and put them on top of 'A' so that his card is lost.

6: Ask the second assistant to then place his card on top of 'B' and take a few cards of pile C and put them on pile B so that his card is lost.

7:Do exactly the same with assistant 3 and pile C except when putting cards on top of the pile so that his card is lost, use the 9 cards left over.

8: After all that collect up the piles so that pile A is at the bottom and pile C is at the top of the deck.

9: Secretly, take 4 cards of the top of the deck and put them at the bottom. (note- This step is very important)

10: Say to the audience, "I'll deal the cards into 2 piles, one pile will be face up and one will be face down. If you see your card in the face up pile shout stop so that I know the trick hasn't worked"!!

11: Deal the top card FACE UP and then deal the next card FACE DOWN next to the face up pile. Continue this until all the cards have been dealt. If you have followed all the steps, no-one will shout "stop"!

12: Put the face up pile to one side and then do step 11 again with the cards that have been dealt face down. Again, the assistants will not shout stop.

13: Repeat steps 12 and 11 until you are left with 3 cards.

14: Turn them over and you will get the 3 cards the assistants had. TADA

Tips & Hints: 1: Start dealing the piles A,B,C secretly just after the assistants have chosen their cards 2: When you are losing the 3 selected cards in piles A,B,C make the audience realise that the assistants can put any number of cards from the next pile on top of the selected card. It should improve the effect.