Simon Aronson - Worker Bees - A Reset

Simon Aronson - Worker Bees - A Reset

Just for the challenge I tried to work out a reset to Simon Aronson's Worker Bees. I thought I'd share my result for anyone who might be interested. If anyone has a better way, I'd be interested to hear about it.

The Effect:

2 spectators cut to and remember a card in the deck, the deck is reassembled and the magician removes the “bugs” – the spelling bees.
The deck is freely cut in half, and each spectator gets a half. The first spectator names her card and the magician spells to it.
The second spectator does not name his card, but he mentally spells it to himself as the magician deals. The magician stops dealing at exactly the last letter and the selected card turns up.
Finally the effect is performed one more time, but under challenge conditions. A fan of cards is held up to the spectator who thinks of any card. The deck is shuffled and the spectator takes the cards and mentally spells one at a time – the merely thought of card turns up at the end of the spelling.

The Method:

Buy Simon’s book here: http://www.alakazam.co.uk/product-Try-The-Impossible-Book.html
I won’t teach the method to Spelling Bees as it is not mine to teach. However if you combine my reset instructions below with the instructions in the book you will have a simple reset to this effect.

Prep:

You need to mark the 1st (3 diamonds), 13th (2 spades) and 52nd (king diamonds) cards in the stack (cards in brackets if you are using the stack detailed in the book. You don't need to know which card is which, although that might make things simpler, I simply mark all 3 in the same way.

In effect changes:

You have to do a couple of things differently during the effect. Proceed as described in the book, have cards selected and returned using the undo influence procedure. When you have dealt the face up pile you should have 1 pile of discards, 1 pile of face up dealt cards, and 1 selected card. Leave those as 3 separate groups.

Then spell the face down cards the same as in the book, add the cards remaining in your hand to the top of the discard pile. The card spelt to face down should be face up on top of the face down dealt pile. Instead of discarding this card, turn it face down and leave it on top of the dealt cards.

The card that was spelt to face up should be added on top of the discard pile (in the book the opposite is true - the face down card is discarded, and the face up card is added to the face down dealt pile.) this has put it back into its correct place in the stack.

Now proceed with the thought of card section. Afterwards drop the face down dealt pile on top of the thought of cards section (as in the book). You need to move the top 3 cards to the bottom of the packet without reversing their order (in his book Simon suggests shuffling them to the bottom, but that reverses their order) - I cut them to the bottom and then false overhand shuffle.

You now proceed as in the book, until you've spelt to the thought of card (end of effect)

Reset:

After spelling to the thought of card, return it to the dealt pile face down, and reverse the order of all the remaining cards in your hand and place onto the dealt pile.

Pick up the dealt pile and spread until you find the first marked card, cut this to the top. Next count off 12 cards from top and place these in a face up pile on table.

Spread to next marked card and cut this to the top, all the remaining cards in your hand can now be put face up on top of the first 12. You have sorted the top 24 cards of the stack into their correct order.

The discard pile contains cards 25 - 52 in order. You just need to spread through these and cut the marked (52nd) card to the bottom, and place these face up on top of the top 24 cards.

Your deck is now back in the worker bee stack.

I should point out that the procedure works exactly the same, regardless of whether or not you need to cut an additional 6 cards to the bottom during the final phase.

Also, you could mark the 25th card (instead of the 52nd) and cut it to the top during the reset (instead of cutting 52nd to bottom) - do whatever is easiest for you.

This is the 1st Time I've worked out a reset like this, and it took me a while to figure out how to approach it, so I thought I'd share my method to figure it out as well:

I simply wrote numbers 1 - 52 on the back of each card in correct stack order, did the trick several times and then worked out how to return to the stack from the end. Eventually I noticed the patterns and was able to adapt it to work every time.

Let me know if you have any questions, or suggestions, etc.

I hope this is of help to someone. Perhaps it will encourage someone to do this wonderful effect without having to worry about having to manually set up the stack each time.