Module 3- Part 5: It seems so fair—but you know the card EVERY time…
Benji
It seems so fair—but you know the card EVERY time…
We just spent a little while discussing how to make your estimation cuts and glimpses ‘invisible.’
But what if you didn’t NEED to do an estimation cut?
It turns out, in a great number of situations, we can do something else entirely that will tell us the identity of the card without ever needing to look at anything.
This idea was brought into the forefront of memorized deck work by the great Simon Aronson, but it’s still a concept that isn’t very well understood among most magicians.
Which makes it VERY fooling…
What’s the idea?
One word for ya, kid.
‘Counting.’
Think about it.
In a memorized deck, the identity of each card also corresponds to a number (from 1 to 52.)
Therefore, if someone were to deal cards to the table and stop at a particular point, we could simply recall how many cards they dealt and convert that number into a card.
For example, if they dealt 10 cards and then stopped, we would know that their card is the 2S (the 10th card in the Tamariz stack.)
In this way, we’ve managed to get the identity of a freely chosen card without any kind of glimpses.
Indeed, if you were in a quiet enough environment, you could attempt this with your back turned—just listening out for how many cards are dealt.
But this is actually a fairly basic application of this idea. Let me show you a more powerful one.
I call this ‘Blue Herring.’
Why?
There’s a Ben Earl effect called ‘Red Herring’ that you can watch the trailer for on YouTube. I never did get round to buying the method, but the effect was so powerfully constructed that I wanted to find a way of incorporating the memorized deck to see if I could make it even stronger.
Disclaimer: I don’t know the method Ben uses. My method was simply inspired by how clean and direct the performance was.
Hence the name…
Our effect: Blue Herring.
Here’s what it looks like:
You let the spectator cut the deck anywhere they like. Wherever they cut, those are the cards you’ll use. No magician’s choice here.
They then deal the cards to the table. You tell them they can shuffle the cards in between dealing. They shuffle, then deal some more. They shuffle, then deal some more.
Next you get them to pick up the shuffled pack and deal to the table again. This time, wherever they stop, we’ll discard the dealt cards (again, we can tell them this clearly—no magician’s choice involved.)
They’ll be left with a packet of cards in their hand. Get them to spread the cards and give them the option to place the top and bottom cards in the middle of the packet—just in case you saw anything. Then, once they’ve done that, tell them they can do the same if they like.
Once they’re satisfied, get them to gather up the cards and take a look at the bottom card.
Now tell them to place the packet of cards back with the rest of the deck and give the entire thing a thorough shuffle.
Despite all of this, you know the EXACT card they’re thinking of.
How?
Counting.
Method:
Alright, my eager apprentice. Here’s the full explanation.
Just saying ‘counting’ is all well and good, but what do I MEAN by that?
You’re actually going to count two things. First, you’ll count how many cards they deal BEFORE they shuffle. Then you’ll count how many cards they deal TOTAL.
Let’s imagine we’re performing this with one of the number decks we created.
They can cut anywhere they like. The genius of this method (and all that genius should be credited to Aronson, not me) is that we’re going to count how many cards are left in the pile, then subtract that from 52 to know the initial top card of the pile, which became the new bottom card.
Alright…
I did it again, didn’t I?
Let me try that again, but in a way that actually makes sense.
Let’s imagine they cut the deck at the 20th card. That is to say, the bottom card of the top portion is 19.
But don’t worry—we don’t need to look at that card. (I promised no glimpsing, remember?)
Either way, the top card of the new pile is 20. But we don’t know that yet.
What we’re going to do is count how many cards they deal before they shuffle. We know that they’re going to deal SOME cards before they shuffle because we ‘force’ that outcome. We say:
“Deal the cards one by one…”
They start dealing and we start counting.
“…and shuffle the cards at any point, then resume dealing.”
We’ve only told them they can shuffle after they’ve already dealt a few cards!
Let’s say they deal 4 cards before they shuffle. That’s our first number. We’re now going to let them shuffle and deal in whatever pattern they like—all we care about is counting the TOTAL cards they deal.
In this case, they’re going to deal 33 cards (because they’re going to deal the card #20 and THEN the other 32 cards to take us to 52).
So we’d remember the numbers 4 and 32.
It doesn’t matter that they shuffle the cards while dealing, because we’re only concerned with the initial 4 they dealt. Those 4 cards are still in stack order, just reversed. So from the bottom up we’ll have 20, 21, 22, and 23.
How do we know that?
We take 33 and subtract it from 52, which gives us 19. That tells us the bottom card of the pile they cut off. Since we know the top card of our pile will be the number that follows the bottom card of the cut off pile, we know the initial top card was 20.
(or do 53 – 33 to find out the top card of the pile and skip the extra step.)
We also know that they dealt 4 cards before shuffling. That means, from the bottom up, we’ll have card #20 and then 3 more cards—the cards that follow it in the stack (aka 21, 22, and 23.)
Now comes the extra subtlety. Since we know the bottom 4 cards, we can let them place the current bottom card and top card in the center of the deck up to 3 times and we’ll still be set for the reveal.
If the first time we give them the option they decide to do so, they’ll have placed a random top card (that we don’t need to worry about) and the bottom card (20) in the middle. Now we just need to switch from 20 to 21—the new bottom card. We can repeat this until card 23 is on the bottom.
If we ask them if they want to do this and they say yes each time, we simply don’t ask them a fourth time. But usually, they’ll either say yes or no for the first one or two and then settle.
Now you get them to square the cards and look at the bottom card. You already know which card that is, but for extra deceptiveness, you can have them place that card back in the deck and shuffle the cards.
NOTE: If you don’t want to do the last step where they shuffle, that’s fine. You’ll be left with a stack equivalent to how many cards they cut off initially (in this case, 19.)
All that’s left is to reveal the cards in whatever way you please.
That’s an example of how you can use the counting principle in a slightly non-intuitive way—by working backward and subtracting the number from 52.
There’s plenty more fun to be had with this principle though, and I look forward to seeing what you come up with!
Next, let’s talk false shuffles…