The Perfected Five Card Trick by George Blake

This ebook teaches solutions to the following problem Rusduck posed in the late 1950s:

Any deck used. Any five cards taken from it by a spectator, and any one of the five cards is set aside. The performer calls out the other four cards to an assistant in another room or to someone on the phone, and immediately the chosen card is named.

Arguably the best rendition of this type of effect is the Bloom Miracle Poker Machine.

These are very similar requirements to the Fitch Cheney Five-Card Trick. But they are not identical. In the Fitch Cheney trick the performer selects the one card out of the five given to him which his assistant needs to identify from the knowledge of the other four cards. In the Rusduck version the spectator selects that card, which makes the problem harder. George Blake describes several ways and ideas to code the selected card with the other four cards.

For those who like puzzles or like to work on problems, I suggest to think about it before reading this manuscript. You may discover alternative ways to solve this problem.