ROLL THOSE DICE - a mental magic dice trick for you

If you have been following the Wolf Creek series of books written under the house name of Ford Fargo and published by Western Fictioneers Library you may have seen that I write the character of Doctor Logan Munro, the town doctor.When I heard that Giovanni Gelati at High Noon Press was looking out for new western characters I was keen to send a new character off on an adventure. But I decided he wouldn't be a medical doctor this time. I was fooling around with some dice on my desk as I thought about this and suddenly, Doc Marcus Quigley popped into my mind.

Marcus Quigley is an itinerant dentist, gambler and sometime bounty hunter. He is on a quest to find the killer of an old friend. His first adventure was DEAD IN THE SADDLE, and each short story ebook takes you a little further along the trail. But each episode is a mystery and things are never quite what they seem.

In The SHOOTER, for example (a play on the name of a shooter in the game of craps) he performs a dice trick. He is an expert on dice. And just so that you can demonstrate that you too are a dice mechanic, here is a little mental magic trick for you to amaze your friends and family.

Ask him or her to roll all three dice. You then ask him or her to do few simple pieces of arithmetic without showing you the dice, but then you  instantly reveal the numbers they rolled.

Method – ask them to use the pad and pencil. Ask them to:

·      multiply the number on the first die by 2                 [12]

·      add 5 to this total                                                     [17]

·      multiply this total by 5                                             [85]

·      add the number of the second die to this total          [87]

·      multiply by 10                                                        [870]

·      add the third die number to this total                      [875]

·      subtract 125 from this total                                     [750]

Secret – Ask them their total. You then simply subtract 125 from that total and you get a three digit number. Each number will represent one number of the dice they rolled, in the correct order.

With the dice I rolled in the photograph as an example,  6, 2 and 5, you will see the calculations in brackets beside each step. So you subtract 125 from that to get 625 and you reveal the dice as “six, two and five.”

Then take a bow!