The simplest card trick in the world

You don’t have to be a Lance Burton or a Chris Angel to pull off this little card trick and it’s almost impossible to get it wrong. As long as you can remember the story and pattern the cards are meant to set up, you won’t have a problem. This also does not mean that you need to pre-arrange the deck. The best part is that this cheat only requires you to use 16 cards and it works by itself.

Step one

Go through the deck and remove all aces, jacks, queens, and kings. These are the only cards you will need for this trick.

Second step

You then need to sort these cards by their own suits so that the Jack, Queen, King, and Aces of each suit are in their own pile.

Step three

You put these four groups of cards into four separate piles. You should start with four piles of kings. Next, cover all but one inch of the kings with queens and then cover all but one inch of the queens with jacks and so on. Apart from each card should be visible. As you do this, tell your audience the following story. Once upon a time there were four small island kingdoms in the middle of the ocean. Each island had a king and a queen and a prince named Jack. And each kingdom had a dog named Ace. One day, a huge tidal wave hit the islands and swept everyone into the ocean.

Step four

At this point, you pick up each group and place them on top of each other. You now hand this packet to the audience and ask them to cut the deck several times.

step five

Now tell your audience that despite this natural disaster, no one was hurt and every person and animal swam back to the nearest island. But something a little strange has happened. At this point, you begin to deal the card into four separate piles until you have dealt all sixteen cards. You will now have four piles of four cards and for the best result you should deal these cards face down.

step six

When you’re done dealing the cards, turn each pile over one by one and you’ll see that the Kings, Queens, Jacks, and Aces are now all in their individual piles. You end this trick by saying that somehow the kings, queens, jacks, and aces manage to swim to their individual islands.

This is a trick that works on its own and will always work. Good luck and have fun with it.