Magicians have believed for a long time that some cards get named far more often than chance allows. This page measures it instead of repeating it, and shows you the count as it stands.
One card. Do not deliberate — the first one that comes to mind is what this is measuring. Nothing is asked of you before or after.
0
answers so far · updated live
The ten most-named cards, out of 0 answers. These numbers are free to quote, and the sample size sits beside them so you can judge the weight yourself.
People are poor at being random, and reliably so. Asked to choose freely, they avoid the extremes, avoid repeating themselves, and reach for whatever has the strongest identity. In a deck of 52, a few cards have far more identity than the rest: the ace of spades has been the marked, taxed, signed card for centuries, and the queen of hearts is the one card most people could describe without looking.
So the expectation is not one in fifty-two. The expectation is a lopsided distribution with a long flat tail, and the interesting question is how lopsided.
A card people are unusually likely to name is a card you can predict while doing nothing at all. Some mentalism works on exactly that: name the most probable answer, be right often enough, and let the misses be forgotten.
What the folklore cannot tell you is how often that would actually work. That is a number, and a number needs a sample. If the top card takes 12% of answers, a performer guessing it is wrong seven times in eight. If it takes 30%, that is a different act entirely. The purpose of this page is to find out which.
The tricks on this site take the opposite route: rather than guessing what somebody will choose, they make the method independent of it. The Gilbreath principle survives a genuine shuffle, and the binary card trick works for any number the person names.
The running answer is on this page and it changes as people respond, which is why the count is printed beside it.
The folklore has long held that the ace of spades and the queen of hearts come up more than chance predicts, because they are the two cards with the strongest identity in a deck. This page exists to replace that with a number.
Because a card people are unusually likely to name is one you can predict without doing anything. Some mentalism relies on naming the most probable answer and being right often enough to seem impossible.
Knowing the real distribution tells you how often that would work, which folklore cannot.
No. People asked to choose freely avoid the ends, avoid repetition, and reach for cards with a strong identity.
That is why a free choice is not a uniform choice, and why some cards should turn up far more often than one in fifty-two.
Yes, and please link back so a reader can see the current count rather than a snapshot. The sample size is published beside the results.
The method and its limits are on this page rather than hidden, including that this is a self-selected sample of people who found a card magic site.
The rest of the site is self-working card tricks you can play in the browser, and the mathematical ones where the method is arithmetic rather than sleight of hand.