How to do the princess card trick

In the princess card trick, someone thinks of one card out of five, you slip a single card into your pocket, and the four cards left are shown. Their card is gone. The secret is simple: the four cards you show at the end are not the cards they saw. Based on our research, the earliest mention we’ve found is Henry Hardin’s methods in T. Nelson Downs’s The Art of Magic, 1909.

What does the audience see?

You show one person five court cards and ask them to think of just one. They don’t touch it, say it or write it down. You take one card off the deck without looking and put it in your pocket. Then you deal the remaining four face up. They look for their card and it isn’t there. The only card that could be theirs is the one in your pocket.

It feels like mind reading because they never told you anything. That is the whole appeal: the spectator does all the choosing in their head.

Why does it work?

A spectator who is concentrating on one card remembers that card and very little about the others. So you show five court cards, then later show four different court cards that look like the first group at a glance. Whichever card they picked, it is not among the four, so it seems to have vanished. As one history of the trick puts it, “the spectator’s mentally selected card is not among the group; hence, the pocketed card is his selection.” Versions exist with both gimmicked and ordinary cards. This one uses an ordinary deck.

How do you set it up?

You need nine court cards from one deck, split into two groups.

• The five you show: K♥, Q♠, J♦, K♣ and Q♥.
• The four you deal at the end: K♦, Q♣, J♥ and K♠.

Each card in the second group is a twin of one in the first: same value, same colour, different suit. The K♦ stands in for the K♥, the Q♣ for the Q♠, the J♥ for the J♦ and the K♠ for the K♣. None of the five shown cards appears in the second group.

With the deck face down, put the four “end” cards on top and the five “show” cards on the bottom. The order inside each group doesn’t matter.

How do you perform it?

1. Show the five. Turn the deck face up in your left hand. Spread just the first five cards at the face toward one person and keep the rest squared. Ask them to think of one card and lock it in.
2. Close it up. Square the spread and turn the deck face down again.
3. “Take” their card. Say you will remove the card they are thinking of. Take the top card without showing its face and put it in your pocket. (It is one of the four end cards, but nobody knows that.)
4. Show the rest. Deal the next four cards face up in a row. These are the end group.
5. The reveal. Ask them to name their card and look for it. It is gone.
6. Leave it there. Don’t take the card out of your pocket. Move on to the next trick while they are still thinking about it.

How do you make it stronger?

• Make the thinking matter. Ask them to picture the card, then say you will “take it out of their mind.” The pocket moment becomes the magic.
• Try it on a group. Because none of the five cards are in the final four, several people can each think of a card at the same time, and every one of them will be missing.
• Keep the pace easy. Give them a few seconds to choose, then move on. A long gap between the two groups helps the second one pass for the first.

What are the common mistakes?

• Showing both groups together. Never let the five and the four sit side by side. Once the four are dealt, the five are gone for good.
• Spreading too far. If you show more than five cards at the face, people may see the twin cards that come later. Spread five and stop.
• Repeating it for the same person. Second time round, they will look at every card. Do it once.
• Using a deck with unusual court cards. The twins only pass for each other when the faces look alike. A standard deck from our playing cards range works well.

Where does the princess card trick come from?

Based on our research, the earliest mention we’ve found is Henry Hardin’s methods in T. Nelson Downs’s The Art of Magic, 1909, edited by John Northern Hilliard. The book teaches “The Princess Card Trick” under that name, with more than one method, including a simple one. Other histories of the trick date it to 1905 and credit it to Hardin, and later magicians kept reworking it with new handlings and gimmicked cards.

Back then the plot stood out because spectators usually picked cards physically, while here the choice happens only in their head. If you like this kind of self-working card magic, try our guides to the key card trick and the 21-card trick.

What helps you take it further?

• The Art of Magic by T. Nelson Downs, free from our public-domain library. It covers card and coin technique, routines and stagecraft from the vaudeville manipulator, edited by John Northern Hilliard, and includes the princess card trick.
• Modern Magic by Professor Hoffmann, also free. It explains cards, coins, watches, handkerchiefs and stage apparatus step by step, with the original engravings.

For more ideas, browse our card tricks collection.

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