The Mysterious Domino Tapping

In this trick you need to prepare four domino tiles by marking them discretely beforehand. You can do this with a sharp knife by placing some light scratches/marks on their backs. Take the blank-one, blank-two, blank-three, and blank-four tiles from a standard Double Six domino set and mark them as follows:

• Blank-one: Mark the upper left-hand and lower right-hand corners of the tile.
• Blank-two: Mark the centre of the top and bottom horizontal sides of the tile.
• Blank-three: Mark the lower left-hand corner and upper right-hand corners of the tile.
• Blank-four: Don't make any marks on the tile at all.

Now present the tiles to your subject and ask him to mentally select one of them. Then tell your subject to place the tiles facedown on a table in any order he wishes. You now explain that you will tap the domino tiles with a pencil and he must mentally count the number of taps in his head. He must count the number of taps starting with the number on the selected domino and then with each subsequent tile with a number one higher than the previous number. Once the subject reaches ten he is to announce it. On turning the last tile tapped, you turn it face up and it is mysteriously the tile he previously mentally selected.

The secret of this trick is in your method of tapping the tiles. Your first six taps may be on randomly chosen tiles, but the seventh should be on the blank-four, the eighth on the blank-three. the ninth on the blank-two, and finally the tenth tap should be on the blank-one. You can do this easily by noting the slight marks on the back of the tiles. This method means that once your subject reaches a count of ten in his head, the last tapped domino is the one he has previously selected in his mind.

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