Phone tricks baffle and delight because people don’t expect them to work. Take a look at this baffling and outrageous phone hack.

This trick looks like the typical “pick a card” trick, except that the magician and the spectator are separated by the phone.

THE TRICK

I call a friend on the phone and explain that I intend to do a magic trick on the phone.

I ask you to shuffle and divide a deck into 2 equal piles, pick a card from one pile, write it down and place it on the bottom of the other pile; this is your Chosen card.

I ask you to slowly deal and call the cards on top of the stack containing your Chosen card. She says the first letter and I stop her, apologizing that I made a mistake; she must cut the cover first. She puts the card back on top. I ask you to cut the deck completely.

I now ask you to slowly deal out the cards from the bottom of the stack containing your Chosen card, calling them out as you turn them over. He hands out the whole pile and I ask him to do it again.

It starts again and suddenly I ask it to stop. I tell him the identity of his Chosen card and that it is the next one to be turned over. He turns over the next card, revealing his Chosen card.

PLEASE GUESS HOW YOU THINK YOU COULD ACHIEVE THIS TRAP. It may help if you answer the following questions about this particularly interesting trick: Why did I ask you to split the deck? Did I really make a mistake when I asked him to deal and pay cards the first time? Why did I ask you to cut the stack? Why did I ask you to deal and shout the cards above? Why not try from below? How did I know the identity and location of your Chosen card?

Congratulate yourself if you generated a reasonable plan to do this trick. The wizard thanks you. He did the trick this way.

THE SECRET

First I asked her to split the deck, so we wouldn’t have to wait while she said all the cards in a full deck,

To do this phone hack, I needed a way to create a key card on the phone. Asking him to deal and call the top cards, and then pretending I made a mistake after he told me the identity of the top card in his pile, I made that card my key card and wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget it.

The rest of this self-contained, mechanical trick played out as described above. The first time he dealt the cards from the top of the stack, I heard my Key card and knew his Pick card was the next card. I wrote your Chosen card.

Then when she came back to deal, I stopped her when she said my key card. I then told her the identity of her Chosen card and predicted that it would appear next. She did it.

This great telephone trick baffles, amazes and delights. WOW.

MAGICAL PRINCIPLES PHONE TRICKS

In my Family Magic books, I treat the concept of card tricks so easy to do that the magician doesn’t have to touch the cards. Instead, he hands the cards to a spectator-volunteer and trains her to do the trick. The audience is truly shocked when I point out that I ‘didn’t touch the cards’.

Telephone tricks take the ‘magician didn’t touch the cards’ idea one step further; the magician not only does not touch the cards, he does not do the trick in the same room, city, state or country as the spectator-volunteer.

In some respects, I find this idea decidedly creepy. However, it works. This magic initiates, amazes and entertains everyone. Adapt phone tricks like this to your computer: communicate by email, webmail, Skype, instant messaging, etc.