To Perform: There are a lot of steps, but it's self-working!
Call your friend and explain that you plan to read his mind with a pack of cards. Ask him to find one; it doesn't matter if it's a full deck, but it should be as close to 52 as possible. Make sure it's a poker or bridge deck. Tell him to shuffle the cards and then to divide them into two relatively equal piles. Ask him to choose one pile and to discard the other pile. Tell him to shuffle the remaining cards. Then, ask him to quietly count the cards in his pile, but not to tell you. (He'll get a two-digit number.) Tell your friend to mentally add the two digits of the number together. For instance, if he has 17 cards, he'll add 1+7 to get a total of 8. Tell him to remove that number of cards from his pile of cards. Now, ask him to think of any number from 1 to 10 and to remove that number of cards from the pile and to sit on them! Then, instruct him to count down in the remaining pile of cards the same number of cards on which he is sitting. (So, if he's sitting on 8 cards, he is to count down to the eighth card in the pile.) Tell him to remember that card, replace it back onto the pack and then place the cards he just counted back on top of the selection. What you need to do now is ask your friend to hold the cards face-down in his hand and deal them one-at-a-time, from the top, and name them out loud. As he is doing this, you are jotting down the cards in a vertical column. You might want to use card-shorthand for this, such as: 2D 3S KH AS, etc. (D = Diamonds, S = Spades, C = Clubs, H = Hearts) After all of the cards are read to you and you've written them in a vertical column, count the number of cards you've written and subtract the number from 18. So, if you come up with the number 7, his card is the seventh one on your list and he's sitting on seven cards! Reveal this to him by saying, "I suspect that the card you are just thinking of is the [name his card]. By the way... you're sitting on [number] cards, too!!" One note: if you jot down more than 18 cards, then instead of subtracting from 18, subtract from 27. It may seem complicated, but it'll work. Try it out!
