sleightless.

Spectator Cuts to the Aces

One minute of setupFull 52Beginner5 min to learn

You never touch the deck. The spectator cuts it into four piles wherever they like, moves a few cards around under your direction, and turns over the top card of each pile. Four aces.

The strength of this one is that your hands are visibly nowhere near it. The cutting really is free. What happens afterwards is not.

How to perform it

  1. Have the four aces on top before you begin. One minute of setup, or a moment while nobody is watching the deck.
  2. Ask them to cut the deck into four roughly equal piles. Left to right. Keep quiet track of which pile holds the original top — it is the last one they put down.
  3. Have them pick up any pile and deal three cards from it onto the table. Then one card from that pile onto the top of each of the other three piles. Then put the pile back down.
  4. Have them do exactly that with each of the other three piles. Same instruction, four times. Because it is the same instruction, it reads as a procedure rather than a manipulation.
  5. Turn over the top card of each pile. Four aces.

Why it works

Because the aces sink three and rise three.

When they deal three cards off the ace pile, the aces are buried under nothing — those three cards go on the table and the aces are now on top of that pile. Every other pile receives one card from each of the other three, and the ace pile hands one ace to each of them.

The freedom is real; the arithmetic is not affected by it.

It genuinely does not matter where they cut or which pile they pick up first, because every pile gets the same treatment. The only thing you need is to know which pile the aces started in, and they showed you that themselves when they cut.

Making it play

More

All of these, with the ones you can deal through on screen, are on the self-working card tricks page.