Chaos Theory – Any Card At Any Number by Julian Moore

Introduction:
The ‘Any Card At Any Number’ plot has long been a holy grail for mentalists, and there have been many solutions and methodologies over the past few decades. It had always been my intention to come up with an extremely simple and workable version of this routine and here I present my solution with ‘Chaos Theory’.

Here are the goals I set myself when creating my own version of ACAAN:

• There should be no memorisation or calculations
• There should be minimal set-up between performances
• Only one deck should be used, visible at all times
• There should be a plot that makes sense to the audience
• The audience should be involved as much as possible in the outcome

You really can spend your time performing this without any kind of brain-freeze as it’s pretty much self-working and you don’t have to worry about recalling strange cribs or doing nasty maths calculations in your head.

When I was coming up with all of this, I was so focused on the dual-reality aspect of the routine that it had completely passed me by that the methodology has a fair bit in common with certain ‘diary’ effects which you probably already know about. Thanks to Bill Cushman for pointing this out to me and helping me come up with a variation which can be done more casually than the original. Although it’s not strictly ACAAN it was worth including in this manuscript for sake of completeness.

Effect:
A cased pack of cards is given to a spectator to hold.

Someone from the audience calls out a number from 1 to 52 (lets say they call out 1.

The spectator is asked to call out two imagined cards – let’s say they name the Four Of Spades and the Eight Of Hearts.

The entire audience is invited to choose one of these cards. Let’s say that collectively they pick the Eight Of Hearts.

The spectator takes the deck of cards from its box, counts down to the 18th card, and there is the Eight Of Hearts. A miracle! The pack is examinable and may be left with the spectator as a gift.