ACTIVITY • Card Tricks
- Prerequisites:
- Peg Words Tutorial
- Memorizing Playing Cards
The Five Missing Cards
A really FUN game to play is to randomly remove five cards
from a full deck. Don't look at them, then put them aside. Then look at all
the remaining cards, one by one. In your mind, "burn" the picture for the
card. For example, if "sheet" is your peg word for the "6
of Spades," then when you see 6 of spades, picture a large bed SHEET
going up in flames! When you're all done, just go through all 52 pictures
in your head sequentially. When you get to a card you don't remember burning,
yell it out. This trick is surprisingly easy. Well, it takes a long time to
remember the peg words well. But once you do that, doing this trick is very
easy, and it will amaze your friends when you call out exactly the five
cards that you haven't seen!
To repeat the trick without confusing yourself, just imagine the picture for
each card frozen in ice instead of burned. Or imagine it much larger in size
than normal. Or flooded. Or whatever! Anything memorable. And after you've
done a half dozen variations, you can return to the "burn" scheme.
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Hey! Try playing this game right now online using a JavaScript web page
written by Scott Cram (used by his permission). Just click
here to open a window with
47 cards in it. You then have 270 seconds to memorize the cards (see
the timer at the bottom of the window). After the time is up, you
will be asked to type in what the 5 missing cards are!
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Red and Black
Michael Curtis, another memory enthusiast, suggests this interesting game:
"All it is is that, rather than memorise each card in a pack's exact
details, you just memorise if cards are red or black.
"You can have an image [peg word] to represent any combination of 4 cards:
an image for red, red, red, red,
an image for red, red, red, black,
etc..
"Then you can look like you are just counting through the cards but you can,
I think, with a lot of practice, memorise the cards' colours/colors quickly;
then do some sort of mind-reading magic trick or just a memory stunt.
" I thought the first 2 colours could indicate a person - so there would be 4
people. Red, Black would be maybe someone called Ruby.
Then the remaining 2 cards would indicate one of 4 items special to Ruby - a
handbag, etc..
"Then, when you look at 4 cards, you can think of a person after reading 2 of
the cards, and think of a specific item when you read the next 2 cards.
There would be 16 specific items in all."
[Michael Curtis' Trick used by permission.]
Document last modified
05 Nov 00. (C) 2000 by
Kevin Jay North; see also full
copyright notice & disclaimers..
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