2026 CCTV Year of the Horse Spring Festival Gala Calculator Magic — Try It Online

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Step 1: Enter a 4-digit number, then press +.
Reveal

2026 CCTV Year of the Horse Gala Calculator Magic Revealed

The calculator magic in the 2026 CCTV Year of the Horse Spring Festival Gala was the second part of Deng Nanzi’s act Surprise Freeze—an interactive segment where the audience could participate, and the numbers precisely “froze” the live moment on stage.

How it was performed

  1. Random numbers: With Nigmat holding a large calculator, Deng invited the audience to call out numbers. The first person gave 1106, the second 88396; the sum was 89502.

  2. Interactive add-on: Deng turned the phone calculator face-down and had audience members in the front randomly tap in the number 2072725.

  3. Surprise freeze: Everyone pressed equals at once. The result was 2162227—exactly the time of the performance: 16 February, 22:27.

Performance steps (summary)

Step 1. Ask one person to think of a 4-digit number and enter it.

Step 2. Ask another person to think of a 5-digit number and enter it.

Step 3. Turn the calculator upside down. Ask several people at random to press keys without looking and enter digits.

Finally. Show the result (it matches the current time).

The secret

The trick relies on step 3: to show there’s no cheating, different people are asked to enter digits without looking at the keys—and that’s the key to the trick. The audience assumes the third number is random, but it is actually generated by the magic calculator.

For the final total to equal the current time, the third number must equal “current time minus the sum of the first two inputs,” i.e. a + b + x = t. So the performer is not using a normal calculator but a magic calculator that produces that third number automatically, like the demo at the top of this page.