Card magic–how is it done?

 

“Here  is  a  technique  that  card  magicians—at  least  the  best  of  them—exploit  with  amazing  results.  (I  don’t  expect  to  incur  the  wrath  of  the magicians for revealing this trick to you, since this is not a particular trick but a deep general principle.) A good card magician knows many tricks that depend on  luck—they don’t always work, or even often work. There are some effects—they can  hardly  be called tricks—that  might work only once in a thousand times! Here is what you do: You start by telling the audience you are going to perform a trick, and without telling them what trick you are doing, you go for the one-in-a-thousand effect. It almost never works, of course, so you glide seamlessly into a second try—for an effect that works about one time in a hundred, perhaps—and when it too fails (as it almost always will), you slide gracefully into effect number 3, which works only  about  one time  in ten,  so you’d  better  be  ready with  effect  number 4, which works  half the time  (let’s  say).  If  all  else fails  (and  by this time, usually one of the earlier safety nets will have kept you out of this worst case), you have a failsafe effect, which won’t impress the crowd very much but at least  it’s a surefire trick.  In the course of a whole performance, you will be very unlucky  indeed  if you always have to rely on your final safety net,  and whenever you  achieve  one  of the  higher-flying  effects, the  audience will  be  stupefied.  “Impossible!  How  on  earth  could you  have  known which was  my  card?” Aha! You  didn’t  know,  but you  had  a  cute way  of taking  a  hopeful stab  in the  dark that  paid  off.  By  hiding  all the  “mistake” cases from view—the trials that didn’t pan out—you create a “miracle.”