Royal Card Discovery

A deck of cards is shuffled. Performer turns up the top card and shows it (suppose it is a three spot). He places it on the table, back up, and counts other cards on top of it, starting from three - thus: three-four-fivesix-seven-eight-nine-ten. He stops at ten and then turns over the next card. Say it is a five spot. He places this down and starts another pile of cards, counting from five to ten. Then he turns over the next card and starts counting another pile from whatever number that card happens to be. Court cards count for ten. If a court card

or ten spot are turned up, they are placed by themselves as they already count ten. When the whole deck has been laid out in piles in this manner, performer takes all piles of less than four cards and places them together.

Turning his back to the audience, he asks a spectator to select three of the remaining piles and push them aside a little. The rest of the piles are to be placed together and thoroughly shuffled. Magician turns to audience again and asks that one of the three selected piles be chosen. The other two packets are turned over. Magician then names the bottom card of the selected packet, and turns packet over to show that he named card correctly.