"super touch" (#85)

"Super Touch" (#85)

You appear to correctly pair up all the kings and queens in a shuffled deck using only the sense of touch.
This impressive close up trick starts with an ordinary pack of playing cards, which you pass to a member of the audience. Ask them to look through the pack, remove the four kings, the four queens and lay them on the table face upward.
Once this has been done, arrange the cards in four pairs, king of spades with queen of spades etc and so on. Then put these four pairs on top of each other to form a pack of 8 cards which is then left face down on the table.
At this stage, ask several people to cut the cards (but not to shuffle them) to give the impression that the cards are mixed.
And now for the main part of the performance. State that your touch is so finely tuned that you can separate the kings and queens just by feeling them. At which point you put the 8 cards behind your back and moments later, display the four kings in one hand and four queens in the other.
Now it's time to up the stakes. So you make the bold claim that you can reunite the four pairs of cards, again using nothing more than your finely tuned sense of touch.
Pick up the four queens, place them on top of the four kings and leave the cards face down on the table.
Again get a number of people to cut (but not shuffle them) the cards until it appears that they are well mixed. Finally pick up the cards and put them behind your back. Seconds later you start to produce the cards from behind your back, two at a time and lay them face down on the table. When they are turned over, they reveal that all four pairs have been correctly matched.
And if you can perform a false shuffle in a believable manner, you could incorporate that as part of the trick.

THE SECRET
Part One: When you put the cards behind your back for the first time, take every second card with one hand and the rest with the other. Or, to put it another way, one hand should take cards 1, 3, 5 and 7, while the other hand takes cards 2, 4, 6 and 8. Due to the way that the cards were ordered before you picked them up, this will always separate the kings and queens.

Part Two: When you put the cards face down for the audience to cut before you put the cards behind your back for the second time, the audience should think that you arrange them in a face down pile at random. But as with most things in magic, nothing is left to chance.
Make sure that both the queens and the kings are in the same suit order. For example spades, hearts, clubs, diamonds. This is a good choice because it goes black, red, black, red, so once you've picked up the first two queens, the next two will be even easier to put in order. Then collect the kings in the same order; spades, hearts, clubs, diamonds. A code way to remember this is the saying SHow CoDe, which has the initials of the suits in the correct order.
Make sure you collect the cards together as convincingly as possible. Make it look as though you're tidying up the cards from the way they were left at the end of the first part of the trick. Once you've done that, turn the 8 cards face down and get the audience to cut ithe pack several times.
And finally, when you have them behind your back, take the top four cards in one hand and the other four cards in your other hand. Then produce the cards in pairs taking the top card from each hand, until all four pairs are on the table. All that's left is for you to ask a member of the audience to reveal each of the matching pairs in turn.