It just works!. If you follow the steps exactly, the card will magically seem to have moved! Before reading on do the trick a few times and see if you can work out what is really going on.
Do you have natural magic in your finger tips! Sadly no. It is all about algorithms and psychology. The steps guarantee the trick has a magical effect, but you have just fooled your audience, rather than moving a card.
You start with 15 cards – so 7 pairs and an extra card. The extra card doesn’t move though. The extra card was always on the other pile. When you took the pairs of cards from the person’s fingers you were splitting the pairs up. What you end up with before the extra card is placed in one of the piles is 7 cards in each pile – an odd number. The extra card is placed on a pile. That pile now has 8 cards. The other has 7.
At this point you pretend to move the card, but you move nothing.
You then check if the ‘extra’ card is still in the first pile, but you don’t count the cards, you deal out pairs. As there are 8 cards there, there are just 4 pairs and no ‘extra’ card. It appears to have disappeared. When you deal out the pairs on the other pile, there are 3 pairs and an extra card – the 7th card. It appears to everyone that the extra odd card has moved!
Exactly the same happens whichever pile the last card is placed on.
The secret is making everyone think about pairs (hence the magic words), and not realise their was an odd number on each pile before the ‘extra’ card was added. By counting in pairs all the time everyone misses the fact that the original extra card has just joined the 7th card to make a pair.
A bit of cs4fn 