One of several names for a particular card trick. It's a rather slow-moving trick, and though the results are somewhat impressive, the set-up will lose you any audience interest. It is, however, fairly interesting on its own, and I therefore recommend just doing it for yourself or to teach another.
To perform the trick:
- Begin with a standard card deck. Remove the jokers.
- Shuffle the cards (of course).
- Lay the top card of the deck face up in front of you.
- If it is a 10, jack, queen, or king, put it off to the side. Otherwise, place a number of cards equal to 10 minus the value of the first card on top of the card (e.g., if the first card is a 6, you should place four more cards on top of it). Aces are low.
- Repeat steps 3–4, creating more stacks and placing all the high cards into their own separate stack. If you do not have enough cards to place on top of a numbered card, use ones from the high card stack. If there aren't enough of those, it's okay, just ignore it.
- Flip over all your little stacks, and pick up any of the remaining cards from the high card stack.
- Pick three stacks—or have your audience do so, if you're feeling sadistic, and are showing this trick to an audience. Place them side by side.
- Pick up all the other stacks.
- Flip the top card of the left and right stacks.
- Begin counting out the cards in your hand. First, count out the sum of the values of the overturned cards. Second, count out nineteen—the origin of the name of this trick. Lastly, count the remaining cards and remember this number.
- Flip the top card of the middle stack. Its value will be the same as the one you just got from counting cards.
Anticlimactic? And how! You can theoretically add some typical magicky things like "The cards are trying to tell me something," but I wouldn't recommend it. If you're looking for a card trick to impress your girlfriend or something, please continue your search.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine how this trick works.