Well you've got about a 4% chance of that happening, or 1 in 25.

Same here.. tried it twice.. did not end up on the target card.

Just clarifying if how I counted was correct..

    5 x x x x 9

Above is a crude illustration.. If I first pick the card with "5", I start counting from 1 from the next card, till 5. And then I would land up on whatever that card is (9 in this example), and then I would repeat.

Did this, but did not work for me.

I also did two passes through the game and did not end up on the trap card. Worried that I was not following the rules correctly I came to the comments to check.

I followed the rules just as you illustrated.

It doesn't really matter which method you use for counting, so long as you're consistent.

It does if you are using the web version, because the key card there is chosen using a specific method.