Shin Lim walks up to the America’s Got Talent stage and introduces himself as a card magician from Boston, Massachusetts. Howie Mandel’s response is a single, flat word: “Woopee.” The audience laughs. Lim winks at the judge. “I didn’t see that,” Mandel says, and the 3,400 people in the theater settle in for what they assume will be a routine close-up act.
They are wrong.
Within the first two minutes, Lim has a spectator write their name on a card, and that name appears sealed inside a glass object the person can see but not touch. “That is my name,” the spectator says, voice cracking. “And my name is inside of like glass or something. It’s like sealed and sealed.” The audience is on its feet before the trick is even fully over. Lim has already made the room forget it was watching a card trick.
Mel B, still processing, tells Lim she “still cannot close my mouth” and that she feels like she’s been “like this” the entire time. Howie Mandel, who had told someone backstage that he’d “had it with card magic,” publicly retracts the statement. “I’m now gonna take that back, Shin,” he says. “Because this was incredible.” He gives Lim a yes. Mel B gives him a yes. Tyra Banks gives him a yes. The third yes is the one that sends him to the next round, and the audience of 3,400 is still standing.
The Piano Player Who Broke His Wrists
Between tricks, Lim tells the audience how he got here. He was 19 when he developed carpal tunnel in both wrists. He had to quit playing piano, and what had been a casual interest in card magic became the thing he took seriously. “Before I knew it, a new passion had ignited,” he says. The card magician who would go on to make Howie Mandel stand up and write his name on a card in front of a national television audience was, a few years earlier, a teenager whose hands were failing him at the keyboard.
That backstory matters because it explains the precision. Every card Lim handles looks effortless, but the control behind it is the kind that comes from someone who had to rebuild his relationship with his own hands. He doesn’t just shuffle. He makes the audience shuffle. He makes them deal, burn, cut, and stop wherever they want. The trick is that he lets you think you control the cards, then proves you were wrong without ever touching the deck after you released it.
Hurry Up, Matthew
The group trick is where the show gets its most human moment. Lim pulls four audience members up to the stage, including a professional card player named Tyler. He has them riffle the deck, pick a card, forget it, then shuffle it back in. “Forget it. The trick’s over,” he tells Tyler, who has just memorized a card and is now supposed to pretend he didn’t. The four spectators split the deck into four piles, deal them back and forth, burn cards off the top like they’re playing poker, and throw away the majority of the deck. “Hurry up, Matthew,” Lim says, with the patience of a man who has done this a thousand times and is watching a stranger fumble a deal on live television. “Live TV.”
Then he asks for the card. Jack of Clubs. He tells the audience the odds of that card being in any one pile are about 60 percent, and the spectators are skeptical. “What would you say that’s a 20 chance? Zero. Less.” Lim lifts the top card of the first pile. Jack of Clubs. He lifts the top card of the second pile. Jack of Clubs. Third. Jack of Clubs. Fourth. “That’s why I have a jack,” he says. “Tyra, that’s why you have a jack.” The audience erupts. Tyra Banks calls him a “card ninja warrior” and says “that is the black magic.” A professional card player, who had shuffled the deck himself and confirmed every card was different, just watched four identical jacks appear at the top of four separate piles.
The Queen in His Mouth
The finale is the trick that makes the audience forget they’re watching a show. Lim brings a woman named Melissa up to the stage. They’re at the finale, and the champion hasn’t been crowned yet. “We don’t even know who’s gonna be crowned champion until later on,” he says. “Much like this card right over here. It’s blank, and I have no idea what it’s gonna be until later on.” He has Melissa take a photo of the blank card with her phone. Then he asks for her favorite card. Queen of diamonds.
He has her shuffle the deck. Cut it. Deal onto his hand and stop wherever she wants. He runs through the deck, confirming there’s only one queen of diamonds. Then he asks Melissa to kiss the face of the queen. “That’s just gonna make it completely unique,” he says. She does. He takes the card, bites the corner, and holds it in his mouth. “I’m pretty sure now I have the queen of diamonds in my mouth,” he tells the audience. Melissa’s hand is outstretched, fingers spread, and he’s made sure she’s clean.
He makes the queen vanish. Then he tells Melissa to open her phone and look at the photo she took at the beginning. The blank card in the picture is no longer blank. It’s the queen of diamonds. “That’s your phone,” he says. “This is not mine. It’s your picture.” The card didn’t just disappear from his mouth. It appeared in a photograph she took before the trick started, on a device she’s been holding the entire time. “Whatever happens in this dimension,” Lim says, “sometimes also happens in reality as well.”
Why It Works
Shin Lim’s act on this stage isn’t a single trick. It’s a 38-minute argument that card magic, the form Howie Mandel had already written off, still has room to surprise an audience that has seen every kind of magic on television. The sealed glass. The four jacks. The queen in a phone photo. Each one is a different mechanism, a different way of making the audience feel like they understand what’s happening right up until the moment they don’t.
The audience of 3,400 doesn’t just applaud. They stand. They ask where the cards went. They try to open cups. They say “unreal” and “I wish I knew how you did that.” And Howie Mandel, the judge who opened the show with “woopee,” ends it by standing up, taking a card, and writing his name on it in front of the camera, because he wants to be part of the trick one more time.
Watch the full performance to see how a Boston card magician with carpal tunnel scars turns a 3,400-seat theater into a place where nobody can close their mouth, where a professional card player forgets his own card, and where a queen of diamonds ends up living in a stranger’s photo album.