How one of the most famous and difficult tricks of all time is now part of my act.
There’s a moment, every time I perform this one, where a room actually stops. I ask someone to name any card, out loud. Someone else, a total stranger to them, names any number from one to fifty-two. A third stranger deals down to that exact number in the deck.
It’s the card that was named. Every time.
This is called ACAAN — Any Card at Any Number — and it’s held “Holy Grail” status in card magic for the best part of a century. The real mystery isn’t one man’s secret method. Magicians have set four conditions for a “perfect” ACAAN — free choice of card, free choice of number, a visible deck, a spectator doing the dealing — and no documented performance has ever satisfied all four at once to everyone’s satisfaction.
The trick actually predates the man most associated with it. A version was published in 1927 by a magician named Louis Nikola. But it’s David Berglas, a magician and mentalist who built and refined it from the 1940s on, that people mean when they say “the Berglas Effect” — a name coined by writer Jon Racherbaumer in 1984, not by Berglas himself. He performed versions of it for decades, even co-writing a book about it, and magicians still argue over exactly what he was doing.
I’ve been obsessed with this idea since I first heard about it. Whether I’m doing it the way Berglas did, I couldn’t tell you — nobody’s ever fully agreed on the rules. But the effect on a room hasn’t changed: total, slightly panicked amazement, usually followed by someone accusing a stranger nearby of being “in on it.”
The odds on paper: 52 to 1 on the card, 52 to 1 on the number. Multiply those and you’re past 2,700 to 1 against the two ever matching by chance.
Here’s a clip of it landing:
Everyone in that room knows, with total certainty, that what just happened isn’t possible. For about four seconds, they’re right.
