I accidentally made someone think I am, literally, the alien philosopher-troll who predicts your decisions

Apparently failing SAN checks when interacting with me can make someone think I’m literally Omega????

After a while after game of poker, I shuffled a deck of cards that came with a poker set. I then, wanting it to be as impressive as possible, gave the deck to someone who has a background in non-existential bad risks and acausal trade to make him go through all of the steps himself, with his hands. I told him to shuffle it; he did a bunch of shuffling. I then told him to face the deck and go through it, stopping at any point (like when a real magician does it to you and you say stop, but on his own) and freely picking a card (while seeing them). I closed my eyes shut and turned away while he was doing this.

He was done, I turned back and told him to pull out the card that he wanted and put it in his pocket, then shuffle the rest of the cards. He shuffled. I told him there’s only like 50% chance the trick works. I stepped closer and briefly touched the cards. I then stepped back so I couldn’t really see anything and told him to put the cards back into the deck and shuffle it again. He did that. I then asked him to give the deck back to me. I shuffled the deck some more, then went through the deck, without looking at the front of the cards.

His card was on the very top of the deck; I pointedly flashed it to him and asked him what card was his. He told me it was the king of hearts. I gave the card.

He was pretty amazed; there was no way I could’ve done this that he could think of, except me somehow feeling the heat of the pocket of his hoodie left on the card.

I then asked him how surprised he would be if I made an advanced prediction of which card he would pick. I then asked him to pull out my phone, unlocked it, told him to open claude (he didn’t know how to do this on iOS so I did that), asked him to open the list of chats and go to the bottom two about poems.

Both had pictures of me holding a deck of cards with a king of hearts and asking Claude to make a poem about that/about a magic trick where the secret card is the king of hearts.

At this point, the best explanation was that I’m literally Omega and he is in a simulation.

(Oops?)

So, how did I do that???

(Perhaps do not read further if you want to be amazed by it! For a lot of people, explanations somehow destroy the magic of it. Or try to guess, before you read further!)

I don’t really ever do magic. I went to a small poker thing between friends for fun, with £10 buy-in. One of the players was a magician (they were not allowed to deal the cards). They showed us a few card tricks; that was fun, but I saw everything that was going on, with a single exception. After the game, I looked at the cards that came with the poker set (they actually had a nicer feel than the ones we were playing with) and noticed that on the back side, the rhombuses were not cut by the borders of the cards exactly the same way. (If a casino uses cards like that, people can learn to recognize all of the cards and exploit the casino; you really want really precise cutting, or maybe the absence of a pattern near the borders.) What’s more, on most cards, almost all of them cut almost through the rhombuses on one side but left a tiny bit of space with a pattern on the other side.

An idea for a trick immediately came to my mind. Simply rotate all of the cards so the side with rhombuses next to the border is on the left. Then shuffle the deck in front of someone; tell them to pick a card from the deck, make them put it back but rotated 180* (should be pretty simple to achieve — just rotate the rest of the deck somewhat, no one ever pays attention to that stuff; though requires looking closely to make sure it is placed back correctly if they hold it etc.), then shuffle it etc., then find the card and, e.g., take a picture of the card, telling Claude to make a poem about it; or ask the person to think really hard of the card, then take a picture of them and tell Claude to figure out what card they think about (you have to correct Claude with the right card, but then Claude still writes a poem about it).

The very cool thing here is that people have no clue. They just do not suspect that you can somehow be looking at cues on the backside of the cards; it’s supposed to be impenetrable. I think I actually tried to hard to not appear like I’m looking at the cards or doing much while going through their borders: no one actually paid attention, people do not get sus about anything at this point, the card is supposed to be completely lost. I actually asked them about what could I possibly have done, and then took steps to make sure it was impossible for me to use the thing they assumed I could. (I wouldn’t actually be able to, for most of the ideas; I can track some sleight of hand, but I don’t have skills to do any of it.)

So, they’re absolutely amazed.

But this time was different.

See, the first time I tried this trick on someone, they (randomly, without looking at the cards before picking it) picked the king of hearts. (I twice took pictures of it and asked Claude to come up with poems about it.)

This immediately elevated the trick the last guy experienced to the level of absolutely impossible. I could show him my Claude chats (and I could later show the people around who needed more convincing the timestamps from the Claude on the web that the pictures and the chats were from a few hours prior and these appeared to be clearly unique chats).

So, he was completely stunned: i appeared to make an advance prediction before he looked at the card faces and picked the one he wanted, completely freely, with no pressure from me.

Being someone who spent a lot of time thinking about suffering, acausal trade, and agents predicting each other, his best explanation was that he is literally in a simulation and I’m literally Omega, the alien philosopher-troll.

While the trick is great, the part where I was able to make an advance prediction is complete luck; there was approximately 2% chance of it happening, but it was absolutely amazing. (Other people also had absolutely no clue how I could possibly have done this. They let me keep the cards!)

Very amusing. Absolutely worth the £10 lost in a few hours of poker.