I Performed ACAAT 165 times: 84% is my final answer.

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I’ve performed ACAAT exactly 156 times in the past 26 days. That’s an average of 6 performances per day. Most of my audience has been Swedish, with a small mix of French and Germans.

If you're not familiar with ACAAT, it’s a non-web app using a fake PIN input screen to secretly input a card, forcing a time on a stopwatch that aligns with a predesignated position of a stacked deck. It does some other stuff too, but that’s the basic idea. Participant names a card, I “unlock” my phone, they use the stopwatch on my phone to randomly determine a time, and BANG—the card they named lands on the "random" number as we deal through the deck.

I reviewed video footage of almost every performance of mine over the past month. Yesterday, I spent hours scouring through the ACAAT footage and post-performance interviews. Here's what happened when participants were asked what they just witnessed (after watching ACAAT in action) -

• 52% (86 people) were either speechless or overly animated (and no further questions were asked)
• Of the 79 remaining participants, 39% (31 people) mentioned the stopwatch during their reflection of the performance.
• 72% (57 people) referenced something like "choosing when to exhale"
• And 84% (66 people) mentioned the breathing alignment exercise at least once but usually more.

This wasn't designed to be a scientific study. It was done for entertainment purposes. I just get the benefit of reviewing the footage from the past month and acting like a high-level scholar (that I'm not).

The results are clear: the stopwatch isn't the star of the show.

The Synchronicity Imp I currently use in ACAAT is “Sync Breathing,” inspired by a book from The Jerx. I frame it as a "breathing alignment exercise"—"when I squeeze my hand into a fist, we both inhale together. When I open my hand, we exhale together. We'll do this for 30-60 seconds in silence."

A bit later, the roles are reversed and the participant becomes the leader. I become the follower. A different spectator runs the stopwatch (which is where the dirty work happens).

Then I say, “Now, since I’m about to quickly [FALSE] shuffle the deck before you make any decisions, you must lead the alignment exercise to get me in sync with your upcoming decisions," which justifies the remainder of the presentation (and process).

Out of 165 performances, 84% of people vividly remembered and recalled the breathing exercise. No surprise there—I lean into it harder than anything else. The mutual experience we both undergo smothers any considerations about suspicions of methods. If I had rushed through more of these performances, people would’ve latched onto the trick’s mechanics instead of the experience.

It reminds me of a quote we display across the stage at the beginning of some BMG shows.

People may critique what you do to or for them (like "tricks"), but they'll hardly question anything if you create a respectful experience with them. Hence, my preferred framing of ACAAT. It's also why Garrett Thomas' has an opening line that works so darn well.

This whole approach could theoretically work with most ACAAN routines.

A few other nuances also help sell the effect. When I hand my phone to an audience member, I call it their timer "for the duration of this experiment." This idea is reinforced every time I reference the timer as "your stopwatch" throughout the performance. During the post-performance interviews, 18% (14 people) out of the 79 remaining participants (that gave measurable feedback) mentioned something equivalent to "we used a stopwatch" or "someone's" phone; that's a relatively high percentage considering these were the active participants who watched me remove my phone. That subtle miscall, plus tying the result to the act of exhaling, kills any suspicion of number forcing.

Let’s call it what it is -

ACAAT is an attempt at CAAN. With the right presentation, it edges closer to ACAAN. And with the best presentations, it becomes a magical experience—sometimes even a mystical breathing exercise that feels worlds away from CAAN.

The simplicity of ACAAT arguably makes it "weaker" than some other more powerful tools on the market. And still, a bit of creativity differentiates it from being "just another trick" or ACAAN. It's one of my favorite things to perform. Hopefully, this same level of creativity is finding its way to Atomic Deck users—but we’ll save that talk for the Guest Post we'll drop in a couple of days on March 1st.