I do a street magic effect where that starts with me asking a random person on the streets to name a card. Ace of spades about once every five times.

P!

I feel a scientific experiment coming on. ..

I believe this guy is right

I agree with not choosing any royal cards

I prefer 7D or 2C. Usually.

It all depends on what you ask them to think about. There is a huge difference between think about a fairly random card or think about your favourite card that would mean something to you (or represent somehow your personality).

With ladies you have enormous chances of them choosing hearts, quite often the Queen of Hearts will their favourite card, other popular choices are Ace and Jack of Hearts or simply 7 of Hearts, and you can cut them off from picture card by saying e.g. 'now you have a suit, we need to select a value for the card, so just think about the first number that comes to your mind between 1 and 10'. This is pushing them towards the 7.

If spectators want to be more random and unpredictable they will usually go for number card, like 3-4, in my experience Clubs are quite random suit. Guys are harded to predict than ladies, but I guess they tend to go for strong picture cards, aces and spades (not when asked to pick RANDOM card, then they would know that their king is not random).

Mine is similar Queen of hearts, Ace of spades, ten of club or any high value clubs.
interesting, Wonder if there is a reason for that.

Queen of hearts, Ace of spade, Jack of diamond etc.... Mostly Ace, King, Queen and Jack.

Ace of Spades, Queen of Hearts, Seven of Clubs.

An interesting topic - useful too for working out a good arrangement for, say, an ID. Here's a site with some interesting stats on this:

http://www.psychologyofmagic.org/research/cards/data.html

This IS a great question!!
I have found that you can 'steer' someone to a very small set of possibilities by casually stating, "Not an Ace, that is what EVERYBODY says and none of the Face cards, they are too fancy".
As has been mentioned here, even though statistically that only cuts it down by 18 our of 52, people tend to fall in the middle with an odd number (5, 6, 9).

Once I started reading this thread I decided to post this link... but you already did,
It's very interesting.
I find that it is accurate, as far as the first few most popular cards go.
The numbers in summary:
When asked to name a card; QH; AH; KH; JS; AD; JH; KS; QS, JD, QD, 7H
When asked to Visualise a card; AH; QH; KH; 3D; JS, 5H, 8C; AD; 8S, 10H, JH
Fascinating stuff. Read the whole study here, pdf file
https://www.psychologyofmagic.org/research/cards/cards.pdf
Appendix: https://www.psychologyofmagic.org/resear......s-ap.pdf
Paul

Queen of Hearts or Ace of Spades.

Here is a link from Scam Nation on YouTube, where they did a 10 year study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgKnWaMFV6Y
9/10C are the least popular, apparently.

Same for me and many others on this post occasionally 7 of spades comes up.

Think of it this way each performance is different
if you have a girl then a QH 7H or 9H
so that when you get gaff cards you use them differently
if someone see your trick 2 different times with the same card he will know that you force it or that you used a gaff card
but some time things different
once I see in one of the groop t-shirt a 8C it was small in the back so I forced that card and do the performance and end it with revealing it in his shirt it was cool

Personally, I started with the four of hearts because I chose a purely random card. It's grown to be my favorite card and it's shown up by pure chance multiple times on my own. But again I do have very strong luck haha. It's not too small a number but not too big. Idk, everyone has their favorite. I've seen 2 of spades used a lot too.

For what it is worth, one study that I read said that if you ask the person to name or visualize a card four cards accounted for over 50% of the choices: Ace of Spades (25%), Queen of Hearts (14%), Ace of Hearts (6%), King of Hearts (6%)..if you ask them to visualize rather than naming a card the percentage for the Ace of Hearts increases to about 11%.

In general they found that people liked Hearts, Spades, Aces, Face Cards and that women preferred lower valued cards (2's and 3's) than men do..

In around 1,200 selections the black 9's were the least chosen cards only 4 times out of 1,200 tries. The "Hecklers Choice" was usually a mid value club and most often the 6 of clubs.

Funny enough, in their sample women were more likely to choose KING of Hearts rather than the Queen.