Force a card! - Any Card! [2021]

You would think being random would be an easy thing to achieve wouldn't you?  However, as magicians who have ever tried to shuffle cards out of 'new deck' order you know just how difficult it can be to achieve that perfect 'random' look.

Take a new deck of Bicycle cards.

You perform a perfect riffle shuffle on the pack. All of the black cards are now at one end and all of the reds are at the other. You do it again. They are now perfectly alternating which looks staged. Chances are you have to thoroughly mix them up several times, and even then, you may still find 7 black cards in a row or all of the court cards down one end.

Even computers are not that good at it. Cloudflare, an internet security firm that handles 10% of all internet requests, uses a wall of 100 lava lamps in the lobby of its San Francisco office to generate completely random patterns. These are then filmed by a high definition camera to create truly random sequences which are then incorporated into their internet security algorithms. 

 Lava lamps in the Cloudflare lobby Courtesy of @mahtin

That's not to say that we don't use this flaw to our advantage as magicians from time to time.  Over on reddit the user Squarific asked approximately 100 people to pick a number randomly from 1 and 10. As you can see from the results, people are not that good at being random!

So how as magicians can you use this sort of data to improve your act? Well, since starting up Red Dragon Magic one of our products has been the 1 Way Forcing Deck. Consisting of 52 identical cards, they are the perfect deck to replace any force cards destroyed in your act.  As an experiment we began noting which force decks sold most often and surprisingly some didn't sell at all.

It appears that like everyone else, Magicians have favorite cards to force, and in an attempt to be  random, all end up purchasing the same cards over and over again to force on their audiences. For example Penn and Teller prefer to force the 3 Clubs. This is well known in the magic community, and as a result, it comes as no surprise that this card is quite popular among magicians.

So what does that mean for you?

We plan to update this list at the start of every year from now on, so the next time you select a specific card to force, check out our list to see which cards are not being purchased by other magicians.  That way:

• The chosen cards are likely to be in stock more often
• Your force card will appear to be more of a 'random selection' to the spectator, giving your trick credibility over other magicians they may have seen recently, and selling the illusion from a psychological perspective that they really have had a free choice!
  
  

Whatever you do with the information we hope you find it useful!