Happy New Year guys! It’s your boy, Drew. My first post of 2026! I know, there’s been other posts by me that have come out this year. I wrote those 2-3 years ago, it’s the punk-ass bitch Editor who is only getting them out now.

I’m trying out a new writer’s voice. How do you like me now?

Okay, yeah, let’s stop that.

The creation of this post is due to young Erika Tsai at Magifest blowing my (and everyone else’s) mind with a simple card trick. Using a borrowed shuffled deck, she had someone freely take any card out of the deck. Then, she quickly searched through the deck to take out a card, the perfect mate to the freely selected card. She did this at astonishing speed! She gave no inclination of any calculation, clocking, or thinking being done. I thought it had to be lightning fast clocking. That’s right, the intricate art of assembling tiny metal gears and springs to create a symphony of machinery tha- I’m dicking you around. Clocking is the much more impressive skill of adding the values of playing cards together, to figure out which one is missing from the deck! I had a friend of mine ask her what method of clocking she was using, and what calculations she was going through in her mind. Apparently, she simply shrugged and said “I don’t do any calculations… I just look at the spread and notice what card isn’t there.”

Would be cool to be able to do that effect, right? Unless you’re a genius like Erika, you’re stuck with me, your good pal Drew. I have good news, there is an effect in the literature that is the exact same, and its easy to do. Plus, I created a very way convenient to practice this over and over again, quickly.

After reviewing many books, notes, effects, consulting magician friends, I found what I think, is the perfect version. Though similar thinking is discussed in Lorayne’s Epitome Location (I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t bust out of his grave to comment on this post to try to sell us his material), the handling I like is “an Unnamed Effect”, located in Eugene Burger’s Final Secrets, on page 125. I give it my highest recommendation! While the little Eugene Burger quirks and performance tips outlined in the book are not for me to share here, what I will say is that he only clocks red or black cards, instead of an entire deck (there exists similarity to Paul Vigil’s use of it in his effect, Diplopia). As you can imagine, clocking 26 cards instead of 52 can make the process much, much quicker. In addition to this, he only casts 10s, not 13s, ignoring all court cards (you eliminate them from being chosen in the beginning). If you’re not familiar with the jargon “cast”, it just means he only counts to 10. So now, you’re only clocking 20 cards, instead of 52. I hope that this little description has gotten you wanting to check out Eugene’s handling. The book is chock-full of fantastic method and philosophy, you won’t go wrong in getting it if you are interested in psychological card work.

A quick note, I wrote a post about how using a four of a kind is better than a singular mate. I still generally agree with what I wrote, but I think in this instance, it’s better with just the mate of the card. It’s faster and more direct. You have to thumb through all the cards to do your clocking, then again to find your mate. I think getting the rest of the four of a kind out would be too long, and would add to any time spent thumbing through the cards; time you generally aim to reduce.

Drew’s Clocking Exercise Deck™

If you’re practicing clocking only a certain color, it’s sort of tricky to randomly take out a card knowing its color, but not anything else about its identity. What I’d first do to practice is take my deck and take out the court cards (you can leave them in if you’re casting 13s) and separate the deck into red and black cards. Then I’d blindly take one card from each pile, then shuffle both piles back together. After, I’d clock for both cards. The problem with this is that it’s sort of a pain in the neck to do, especially if you want to practice over and over again. That’s why I came up with this deck!

This is a full 52 card deck. However, you’ll notice there are three types of backs scattered throughout this deck.

Cards with a red back, blue back, and then a red back with a big cross drawn on with a sharpie. What I did, was take a deck with a red back and remove all the black cards from it. Then I took all the black cards from a deck with a blue deck, and put them in in my red backed deck. So I had a deck with every card in it still, but the backs of the cards indicated what color the cards were. Then I took out all the court cards and put a big fat X on the back of them. The idea is to shuffle all of these cards together. Then, you can spread the deck facedown on the table, easily see what card is red or black, and what card is a court card so you know not to choose it (if you are only casting 10s). If I’m not casting 13 and including the court cards, why leave them in at all? I want to simulate what it would be like to clock in a real life performance as accurately as possible. Leaving the courts in the deck to spread past them serves that purpose. If you include court cards in your calculation and cast 13s, then you can just not draw an X on the back of them, simple! To do the exercise, you just take out a card, note it’s color, and then clock away! It instantly resets and couldn’t be any easier to use.

Sure, you could mark up a single deck with a pen or something, but I thought different colored backs would be the easiest to see in a spread. By the time you finish making one, you’ll have an another deck with the opposite colors to use as well (in my case above, the other deck would be a deck with red backed black cards, and blue backed red cards). What I do is have one deck on my kitchen table, and one under my bed. Every night before I go to bed I try and clock 5-10 times, then I do the same when I wake up. It’s been a week so far, and my speed is considerably faster than it what it was when I started. Give it a go and see how you get on!

Teaching Grown Adults How to do Addition

I’ll part with a tip on what I found made my clocking faster. After many repetitions, instead of actually calculating, I found I was just recalling a memorized answer. In the following examples, note I am casting 10s. For e.g. I just knew that 7 + 7 was 4 (7+7 = 14, dropping the 10 after to leave us with 4), 8+6 was 4, 7+6 was 3, etc. After many repetitions, I memorized the output for every combination of 2 values (in addition to thinking of 9s as just “-1″s) so I found I was literally just spreading from the face of the deck to the top without stopping to think at all. With the speed, I think I got a pretty close rendition to Erika’s performance of “clocking” at Magifest.

Tick away, fellow clockers.