How To: Perform the Spelling Bee card trick

Check out this episode of Brian Brushwood's Scam School from Revision3 to find out how to pull the best cons, bar scams and magic tricks. It's rare to find a trick that you can actually fool yourself with...and that's exactly what you get with this episode!

In fact, grab a deck of cards right now, and we'll see if this works:

Start with any nine cards from the deck, and place them face down into three piles or three cards each. Pick up any pile and look at the bottom card: that's your card, so remember it.

Place the pile you selected on top of either of the other two piles, then drop that combined pile onto the last one. Now things get interesting:

Deal one card face down onto the table for each letter of the value of the card as you spell it out. In other words, if your card is king, you would deal down four cards as you spelled "K-I-N-G". When done, drop the rest of the cards on the pile you just dealt.

Next, spell "O-F" as you deal two more cards to the table. Drop the remaining cards on top.

Next, spell the suit of the card as you deal down one card for each letter. Remember that suits are plural, so you would deal five cards for "C-L-U-B-S". Again, drop the remaining cards on top.

Finally, pick any five letter word, and spell it our as you deal. It could be "scams", or "magic", or even your own name.

ready for the reveal? Turn over the last card you dealt...If you followed the instructions carefully, it should be your original card!

As we explain in this episode, this works on a couple of simple mathematical principles, and will work for any card in the entire deck!