MORE ON CARDS

A CURIO WITH CARDS


In my ebook series of short stories The Casebook of Doctor Marcus Quigley, published by High Noon Press, you may have noticed that Marcus Quigley, itinerant dentist and occasional bounty hunter is also a proficient gambler. He is strictly honest, of course, but he can spot a card-sharper or a dice mechanic within moments..

A couple of blogs ago I talked about a simple dice trick that you can try out on friends. Marcus used it in book V of the series, The Shooter.

This time I'm going to focus on another little curio with cards.

Instead of counting the cards one by one, you can check a 52 card deck, that is a deck without jokers in it, by spelling out the names of the cards. Before you start, look through the deck and bring the King of Diamonds to the bottom. You are now ready to start.

With the deck held in one hand, all face down, place one card face down on the table and call out ‘A’, then toss the next card on top and call out ‘C’, then the next and call out ‘E’. 

So you have spelled Ace. Now continue through the entire deck .... ‘T’, then ‘W’, then ‘O’, and keep going through the cards and  spelling out each letter until you do the King.

And as you reach the final card just ask the audience which of the four kings went to war? Let them guess, then you toss down the King of Diamonds face up, explaining that you can always tell it was him, for he was the one who lost an eye. And if they would like to check, they will find that it is true.

Just remember that you spell Jack, rather than knave!

Then you may like to show all four Kings and tell them who they are. We are not exactly sure, but it is speculated that the  four Kings relate to the following historical characters:

The King of Diamonds is suspected to be Julius Caesar or Caesar Augustus.

The King of Spades is said to be King David.

The King of Clubs is said to be Alexander the Great.

And the King of Hearts is said to be Charlemagne. 


The King of Diamonds is usually the only one in profile, hence the one eye, and the King of Hearts is sometimes called the ‘suicide card,’ because it depicts a King stabbing his head with his sword.

Vol VI RATTLER'S NEST IS OUT NOW.

And I'll be back soon!

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!