ACTIVITY • Card Tricks
Prerequisites:
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.
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.]
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