Photo by Eric Kilby

If you have never heard of Derren Brown, I highly suggest that you take a few minutes and look into him a little bit more. He is from the UK and is a famous hypnotist/mentalist/illusionist/magician/entertainer/painter. He has had tons of TV shows, has released several movies, written books, and does a show on tour. The tricks he does are amazing, and are seemingly unmatched by anyone who I have come across. He really does incredible things (the list is endless, so the vague “thing” is appropriate), so check him on YouTube.

On one of his shows, he wanted to prove his ability to count cards. There are several different methods to doing this, but I will quickly run over a short lesson.

1. You need to keep score of the all the players cards that you see.

2. Cards have the following values. 2,3,4,5,6=+1 ; 7,8,9=0, 10,J,Q,K,A=-1.

3. A deck with a high score (meaning more low cards have been seen) is in favor of the player.

4. A deck with a low score (meaning more high cards have been seen) is in favor of the dealer/house.

5. If the score is high enough in the favor of the player, and the player knows it, they can gain a slight advantage over the house.

That is card counting in short. Casinos have counteracted this method by playing with multiple decks in the same shoe, as well as not running through all of the cards before reshuffling. This helps put the favor back in the house’s hand.

Being Derren Brown, and showing off his amazing mind powers, he goes several steps further. Not only does he keep track of the running count, he keeps track of exactly what cards are remaining. He keeps tracks of How many 5′s, 9′s, J’s, and so on have been shown, and how many are remaining in the pile. Think of how fast you would need to compute everything, it would be hard to keep track of even on paper.

How he does it???

He explains how he does it, and it is ingenious. It involves the visualizing ability the we put a lot of importance on at SpeedStudent.com. He has a room that he goes to in his mind, specifically created for this exact purpose. In this room there are 52 items (to represent each individual card). He has linked them to a card using some mnemonic device.

In the video, he is playing at a casino that is using 4 decks, so he attaches 3 small stickers to each item. As each card is shown, he moves around the room in his mind, and removes 1 sticker from each card item. By doing so he keeps track of exactly how many of each card is left in the deck. If he has removed all 3 stickers, and the 4th 5 of diamonds shows, he simply removes that item from the room.

Thinking about how much of a nightmare it would be to keep track of all those items can hurt your head, but he has spent years developing his mind to be able do complete some mind feats. That is short over view of what he did, and how he did it. You can watch the video at this link, and be sure to check out some of his other videos. Simply amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1mweFSqACU – Check it out, Fantastic!

If you have any questions or comments, please write them in the section below. Thanks again, and I hoped you enjoyed today’s post. Best of Luck.