This card trick is known as the Informer. It involves proving to the audience that you can use your “informer”- a normal Jack you have taken out of the pack in front of their eyes, to find out what cards have been picked by members of the audience.

From the audience’s point of view they have seen you ask two volunteers to each pick a card and keep it hidden from you. They have tucked their cards away in their pockets. You have then given them the Jack and asked them to place it in the pocket with the other card for a few moments. When they’ve returned it, you’ve apparently held it up to your ear and asked it to inform you of the other card’s identity- with amazingly accurate results!

This performance is of course all an act designed to distract the audience from what you’re really doing. All the actions which you ask your volunteers to perform are designed to bring the two cards whose identity you know onto the top of the pack.

You begin by shuffling the cards. You then turn them face up and search through until you come to a Jack. This will be your informer. While you do this you will need to take note of the cards which are the 2nd and 3rd from the pack bottom. These are the cards that your volunteers will end up with.

How can you be sure of this? Your next moves will be designed to manipulate the situation so that these two cards must be chosen.

Get a volunteer from the audience to split the pack into two. They should then take the half that was on the bottom and count out the cards, one at a time onto the table, announcing the final total to the rest of the room. It’s not actually at all important to you what this number is.

The newly rearranged cards should then be placed on top of the other half of the deck. At this point the two cards which you have memorized will be the 2nd and 3rd from the top, but in the reverse order than when you looked at them before. The card that was 3rd from the bottom is now the 2nd on the top, the one that was 2nd from the bottom is the 3rd on the top.

The card that was right at the bottom is now the top card. You want to get rid of this one now, so instruct your volunteer to take the top card and slide it into the middle of the pack. Get them to do the same thing with the card that is now on the bottom.

Your memorized cards are now the top two cards, so all you have to do is get two volunteers to take the top cards- remembering of course which person has taken which card. Get them to hide the cards in their pockets and go through the performance of asking the Jack to find out for you what the chosen card is.

You can extend this trick to as many cards as you are able to memorize, although it’s important not to be overambitious or you’ll get confused. Two is a good number because the second will confirm your abilities in the eyes of the audience without being too hard for you to remember.

The main way this trick can go wrong is if you forget that the memorized cards will be reversed in order when they come to the top of the pack. As long as you keep this in mind you won’t mix them up.

Twisted cards is easy to perform but difficult for the audience to see through. It involves getting a volunteer to insert the two chosen cards into the deck, and then swiftly revealing that they have magically appeared at the top of the pack.

The way this trick works is through careful guidance of the audience’s concentration, so that when you display the cards at the end of the trick they see what they expect to see.

Before you begin the trick you should take out the five of hearts and the six of diamonds. Place these two cards at the top of the deck, which is where they will stay until the end of your act.

The performance begins with you announcing that you will make the two chosen cards reveal themselves, wherever the volunteer places them in the pack. You begin by searching through the pack and pulling out the five of diamonds and the six of hearts. These look very similar to the two cards you have already arranged at the top of the deck. Announce the names and the color of the cards you have taken out, but avoid drawing attention to the suits- you don’t want anyone to think about remembering which card is which suit. Tell them that you will bring the “red five” and the “red six” to the top of the pack after your volunteer has restored them to the deck, placing them wherever they choose.

Hand over the five of diamonds and the six of hearts and instruct the volunteer to put them back into the deck.

Once they give the pack back to you, everything is set up for the big finale. To make it as dramatic as possible, when you receive the deck keep it held out away from your body, making it as clear as possible that you are not manipulating the cards in any way.

Pull off the top two cards and hold them up for the audience. It’s a miracle- the “red five” and the “red six” have migrated to the top of the deck!

It’s very rare that anyone will notice that these aren’t exactly the cards that the volunteer inserted into the pack. If you do get that one overly observant person in the group who spoils it for the rest of the audience then all you can do is laugh it off and try a new trick. Making a big fuss about the failure will only increase its importance, while no one remembers the one bad try in a series of successful tricks. This is one of the most important things you will need to learn if you want to perform card tricks well- failure can be glossed over and forgotten as long as you treat it with the right attitude.

The important thing to remember with this trick is that you need to keep the audience from thinking about the suits of the cards, so never refer to these, and just call them red cards.