Module 4 – Part 3: A Quick Reminder…
Benji
A quick reminder:
Since we’re going to be talking a lot about the ‘faro’, it’s a good idea to remind ourselves of what exactly that means.
To do so, let’s shamelessly borrow the explanation I gave on the faro in the previous module…
“The faro shuffle is simply a fancy way of saying a shuffle where all the cards perfectly interweave.
Imagine shuffling the cards…but perfectly.
There are two types of faros (at least, two types that we’re concerned with right now.)
Out Faros and In Faros.
An Out Faro is where the bottom card and top card stay constant throughout the shuffling. When you shuffle, the bottom card of the bottom packet stays at the bottom, and the top card of the top packet stays on top.
An In Faro is when the top card of the lower packet becomes the new top card, and the bottom card of the upper packet becomes the new bottom card.
Here’s a good way of thinking about it.
Open your hands and place your left hand on top of your right hand. Your hands should be parallel to your body (with the tips of the left fingers facing the right, and the tips of your right fingers facing the left.)
Your left hand represents the upper portion of the deck, and your right hand represents the lower portion of the deck.
Now separate your hands and interlace your fingers.
Which finger is on top now?
If your left first finger is the top finger, you’ve performed an Out Faro (the left first finger was on top before, and it still is after weaving.)
The bottom finger should be your right little finger—again, the same as before.
However, if you’ve performed an In Faro, your right first finger will now be the top finger, and the left little finger will be the bottom finger.
It’s the same with a deck of cards.
Only, replace 10 fingers with 52 playing cards. In an Out Faro, the top portion of the deck gets shuffled into the bottom portion so that the card originally on top stays there, and the card originally on the bottom does the same. However, in an In Faro, the new top card is the top card of the bottom portion, and the new bottom card is the bottom card of the top portion.“
Okay, now that we’re on the same page, let’s get even deeper into what’s going on here.
Here’s a diagram that I found in the classic ‘Expert Card Technique’:
Take a look at the picture above. Save it somewhere. Print it off. Heck, turn it into a t-shirt if you must.
Do whatever it takes to ensure you have it handy at all times—it’s going to be one of the most useful pictures I’ve ever shared with you.
(that sounded weird, didn’t it?)
All I mean is that this little diagram is the ‘key’ to many of the mysteries of the faro shuffle, so you should make sure you grab it and save it somewhere safe.
I spent a lot of time wondering if a diagram or table like this existed out there somewhere before I discovered that it was right ‘under my nose’ all along in Expert Card Technique. Since I found it, I’ve been referring to it constantly.
In essence, it shows you the location of each card in the deck after each subsequent faro shuffle.
And what’s beautiful is that it uses a number for each card—which means we can ‘sub in’ our memorized deck. After all, our memorized deck is just a series of playing cards with those very same numbers attributed to them.
So we can ask ourselves questions like “where would the 2C be after 4 faro shuffles?” and immediately get an answer.
In this case: 2C is card 27. Look at the table that says ‘4th shuffle.’ Once you spot 27, count through the cards to see where it is. If you said ‘9th’, you’d be right.
There’s actually an even faster way of making that calculation, and that’s with THIS chart, also found in Expert Card Technique.
I consider this chart the perfect ‘companion’ to the first one I shared with you.
It shows you the movements of each card through each subsequent shuffle. The number 1 – 8 stand for the 8 faro shuffles—but it’s important to not that the whole thing is ‘cyclical.’
That means that once we get to 8, if we give it another faro shuffle—we return to ‘1’.
Also, note that the ‘8’ column contains the same numbers as the first column. That’s just to show that the 8th shuffle brings you back to starting order. We only really need to use the columns ‘1-8.’
Using this example we went through above, we’d look for ‘27’. I see it on the top row, under the ‘7’ column. If we then move along by 4 (the number of faros we specified) we arrive at column ‘3’. If we look at the number there, we see 9—the same result we got in our first calculation.
Anyway, perhaps that’s too much information too early on. Don’t worry if that doesn’t seem a particularly useful chart just yet. We’ll come back to it later, I just wanted to give it to you now since I find it very useful to help understand what exactly is happening when we faro the cards.
NOTE: Those images will also come in handy when you start doing faros with the memorized deck since they tell you which card you should be cutting at to cut half the packet. If you look at the number in the 2nd column on the 4th row in each chart—that’s the card at the midway point in that shuffle. So after 1 faro shuffle, the card you want to cut to is 39 (or, in Mnemonica, the AD.)
I think it also serves to highlight my point about why the faro shuffle is so powerful and underrated—it seems like a genuine shuffle, yet at each moment you retain complete control and knowledge over the location of every card in the deck!
It all feels so fair. It feels like they can see what’s going on exactly, but really they don’t.
Now, before we get into any of my ideas, I’d encourage you to ‘play around’ with the faro yourself. Hit up this site: https://natedog.com/cards/faro.html
At the above link, you’ll be able to experiment with performing faro shuffles on various stacks and arrangements of cards without needing to actually do it on the cards. It’s a mighty useful tool that I find a lot of fun to use.
I know, I know…I have a strange definition of ‘fun.’
Once you’ve satisfied your curiosity, join me in the next section as I walk you through the easiest method for doing the faro that I’ve ever encountered…