Here is a very simple card trick that could earn you a lot of money in bar bets. Really. And it doesn’t involve any sleight of hand at all. Watch him perform the trick, and then pause the video when he gets done, at the 2 minute point:

Admit it – it is a good trick. If you don’t understand magic, it is baffling. But if you do understand magic, especially after watching UM #2 and UM #3, you may be able to figure out what he has done. Watch the rest of the video for the reveal.

How does this trick work? Once again, the magician has used the bottom of the deck to store a special card. No rigging of the deck is involved, however. It shows how powerful the bottom-of-the-deck technique can be.

But the other thing at work here is human psychology. In particular, the magician is using “the way that humans typically parse words” against the person watching the trick. Since the person watching the trick has seen his/her card being put onto the table, he/she parses the magician’s sentence to mean the card in his hand. But the sentence can be parsed in a different way, while being just as valid, and the magician wins the bet.

That parsing trick is very easy to set up and use in many different situations. For example, the magician can say, “I’ll bet you $100 that I can predict the next word that comes out of your mouth.” The person agrees, the magician writes a word on a piece of paper, and then says, “By the way, did you bring an umbrella today?” The victim hears the “by the way” and parses it to assume that the umbrella question falls outside the realm of the bet, then automatically answers “no”. The word written on the piece of paper is “no”, and the magician wins the bet. By combining that parsing trick with a good card trick, the result is a bar bet that cannot lose (unless the victim knows the tricks).

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