Card tricks don’t have to be impossibly difficult to get a great reaction from your friends and family. As long as you follow the instructions with confidence and accuracy they will be unable to discover how you are doing it.

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.