'Acaacaasaan'
 

Okay, so here's the deal. Richard Kaufman will soon be shipping out the many times delayed überbox of the living legend of mentalism, David Berglas. Mr. Berglas is best known for his 'Any Card At Any Number' ('ACAAN') plot and the box seems to have quite some of those routines included (I really really hope he doesn't explain the actual 'Berglas Effect' on it because if any effect should be kept a secret, it's that one.. and I figured out how it's done by accident last week :blush:).

Now I know the box will trigger many people their creativity and have them come up with tons of variations on the 'ACAAN' plot (as if there aren't enough of them yet). I'm guilty of this too (and the box didn't even ship out yet) so I thought.. let's post my brand new 'ACAACAASAAN' plot in here before anyone else comes up with this. ^_^

'ACAACAASAAN' stands for 'Any Card At Any Cut At Any Stop At Any Number'. The original 'ACAAN' is any card (1 in 52) at any number (1 in 52) and thus seems to have a super small chance of 1 in 2,704 to succeed.. which of course is enough for extremely powerful magic. But the 'ACAACAASAAN' is any card (1 in 52) at any cut (1 in 51) at any stop (1 in 51) at any number (1 in 52) and thus seems to have a chance of 1 in 7,033,104. To make it even better, if you're about to "fail" there are very solid and deceptive outs which make the chance even smaller.. about 1 in 90,000,000 so to speak.. calculations to "prove" this are included in the performance. :cool:

So if you would perform this effect with outs in only 3 minutes (which is impossible but well), it'd theoretically take you more than 510 sleepless years to succeed just once, compared to the 5-6 days it'd take to succeed at the usual 'ACAAN'. ;)

So hereby the standard routine. (I might post a performance video someday as well):

1. The magician spreads the regular deck of cards face-up on the table or in his hands (there is only one deck involved; 52 cards only). The spectator is allowed to think of truly any card;
2. The deck gets squared up and the magician won't be touching the deck anymore. The spectator cuts the deck wherever they want and square it up themselves;
3. The spectator tells what the card is they thought of and the magician makes clear it's absolutely impossible to know where that card is located due to the fact the deck has been cut. So even if he knew where the card was in the first place, he wouldn't know now;
4. The magician asks the spectator to think of any number;
5. The magician asks the spectator to take off cards from the top of the deck one by one and stopping whenever they feel like stopping;
6. The spectator stops at a random amount of cards. The magician then asks what the number they thought of was;
7. The spectator says the number and the magician tells them to take that amount of cards off of the remaining part of the deck;
8. When reaching the amount of cards, the magician tells the spectator to turn over the card right at that spot, which is the card the spectator thought of to begin with;
9. The spectator is definitely amazed. Everything can be examined as everything is and has been all clean during the entire routine.

Hope you like the concept! :D

nice effect! :D
are you gonna make a video of it'?

that sounds impossible in theory... the you "figuring it out by accident" part( JK), but seriously, that plot sounds amazing, it's like asking someone to just go in a warehouse out of 100 and finding an item that have been unknown to human for a 100 years...( i'm a fantasy freak, love everything about it). just a question... you can achieve the "Berglas effect" with "force impossible" right? it seems like you can... since it looks like you weren't doing anything at all during the effect.

You could indeed tweak the 'Force Impossible' in a way to use it in an 'ACAAN', but its originally just an 'Any Card'. The part that's missing big time is the '-AAN'. ;)

uhm... just one question... can ANYONE actually figure "force impossible" out from the online videos? or is the 28+ people who knows how it's done just bought it online when it was released or taught by you personally?

A couple of people got close from watching the videos. I tried helping two contestants who were close and definitely on the right track to win the contest but for some odd reason they never replied anymore. :(

"News reports show that two magicians were found dead this morning after almost discovering the secret to one of magic's most mysterious effects."

Hahaha! I like the plot I think that it is impossible there maybe no way of making a practical method to do it.

There already is a practical method with all necessary outs (although most often you wouldn't need those), no worries. ^_^

That sounds like some material from the Devil's Picturebook. Was that your inspiration?

Sounds like a bit of a variation of Automated ACAAN? But I like it, looking forward to seeing the maths on those probabilities :P