Module 4 – Part 5: So simple you’ll fool yourself…

Benji

So simple, you’ll fool yourself…

Here’s ‘the skinny’ on one of my all-time favorite things to do with a deck of cards. I call it ‘Squared’, and I think it’s the perfect introduction to memorized deck work (because it doesn’t require any memorization!)

Actually, you won’t even need a full deck for this.

I first discovered the idea behind this routine as a teenager, in a magic book from 1909 titled ‘The Art of Modern Conjuring.’

I’ve been enjoying using it ever since. In fact, it took me far longer than I’d like to admit to even figure out what was going on—it would fool ME just as bad as it fooled the audience! Once I understood the mechanics, I devised a couple of ways to make the whole thing even more fooling.

Here’s what it looks like:

You display 16 cards to your audience—the ‘court cards’. The cards are arranged in their suits (the Jack, Queen, King and Ace of Hearts and so forth) and laid out on the table.

The spectator can stack the piles up in whatever order they like. From here on out, you promise, it’s “all in their hands!”

Tell them to cut the deck. Once they do, tell them to cut it again. And again. And again.

Tell them to cut the deck until they feel satisfied that the cards are hopelessly mixed.

Remind them that each time they cut, they are changing the eventual outcome—cut one card more and they’d change the entire effect.

Now get them to name a number between 1 and 10. Whichever number they name, they can remove that many cards from the top (or bottom) of the deck and place them on the bottom (or top).

Once they’re absolutely satisfied, have them place the cards back on the table in front of you.

Very slowly and cleaning, you deal the cards back into piles of 4—just like how they started out.

(in fact, you could even get THEM to deal the cards!)

You remind them that they had complete control over the cards the entire time. They mixed the deck. Even so…

You flip over the cards to reveal that they somehow, inexplicably, shuffled together all four Jacks in one pile, all four Queens in another pile, all four Kings in another pile, and all four Aces in another pile.

It’s astonishing, hands-free magic.

And the method?

The method is simplicity itself.

How it works:

The idea is that everything you do in this effect is about making it FEEL like the cards are being ‘mixed’, when in reality…all you’re ever doing is cutting the cards!

Now, I like to think of Squared as a ‘microcosm’ of the memorized deck—because it introduces you to some of the most essential memorized deck ideas.

This is one such idea:

Cutting the cards SEEMS like you’re mixing the deck, but in reality—you can cut the cards as much as you like without disturbing the overall order.

This effect is a great way of discovering that in action.

Try it, with the cards face up. Arrange the cards as they start in the effect—the Jack, Queen, King and Ace of each suit arranged in that order:

JC JS JH JD

QC QS QH QD

KC KS KH KD

AC AS AH AD

Now stack those piles, anyway you like.

I’ll just use two of the piles to save space.

Now cut the deck a bunch.

After cutting, spread the cards and count the distance between each four of a kind. For example, let’s say after cutting the deck, the cards look like this:

Even though the card on top has changed, that’s really the only thing that’s changed. Most importantly, the DISTANCE between each four of a kind is the same. There’s 3 cards between each Jack, 3 cards between each Ace, three cards between each Queen, and 3 cards between each King. This means, when you deal the cards out, if you deal them into four piles one at a time, all the Jacks will come together in one pile, all the Queens in another, all the Kings in another and all the Aces in another.

A nice subtlety comes in at the end where we say:

“Let’s return to how we started—4 piles.”

Well, we actually started with 4 piles of consecutive cards. That’s a completely different thing to dealing 4 piles of cards one by one. But because the final IMAGE is the same—-4 facedown piles of cards—that line is readily accepted.

Now, that’s all well and good so far. But what about the funny business with the numbers? What’s with that?

Again, that’s far simpler than we let on. Really, it’s just ‘verbal misdirection’ from what’s actually going on…which is that we’re simply cutting the deck.

When you think about it, anytime we cut the cards, we’re cutting a certain number of cards.

All we’re doing now is giving them the chance to tell us how many cards they want us to cut. Again, this really doesn’t make a difference to us since our method will work no matter how many cards they cut. A cut is a cut, and our method isn’t affected by them.

But it misdirects attention from the real solution by placing importance on something that really isn’t important—the number they name.

We can make things even harder to reverse engineer by asking them if they want us to remove that number of cards from the ‘top or bottom?’

Again, it doesn’t matter. Either way, all it’s going to amount to is the equivalent of giving the deck a cut.

NOTE: from here on out, when you see me refer to the ‘shuffle procedure’, I’m talking about the method you just learned.

Now, here’s the one thing to bear in mind:

As you count the cards, make sure to count them without reversing their order. So, if counting cards off the top, don’t count by dealing them onto the table, count by thumbing them off the top of the deck and into your hand, keeping each subsequent card underneath the previous. If counting off the bottom, spread the cards into your other hand, keeping each subsequent card on top of the previous.

Alternatively, you could move the cards one by one. If they said 4, you could move a single card from the top to the bottom (or vice versa) and then do the same thing 3 more times. Each time amounts to a single cut.

NOTE: I picked up these subtleties from Dani DaOrtiz’ ‘Or Not’. In the explanation video for that effect, he credits Juan Tamariz for them.

ANOTHER NOTE: when cutting, make sure each cut is a SINGLE cut. You cut half, then complete the cut. Nothing fancy. Thankfully, this is the type of cut spectators are most familiar with. To avoid spectators accidentally cutting in the wrong way, make sure you do a couple of demonstration cuts first.

However…if, even after this, they start to get too fancy in their cutting, just let them go with it. Don’t start trying to tell them what to do—this will giveaway the fact that you care about the order of the cards (which is something we always want to avoid.)

Instead, I’d let them go for it, and proceed to perform a different effect using these 16 cards.

Or, if you’re dead set on performing THIS effect, collect the cards back and spread them face up and say “wow, you shuffled pretty good. Let’s see how your friend does…”

And rearrange the cards into their starting position, then hand the cards to your friend, this time making sure it’s clear the type of cut they should use. At the end, as you reveal the magic moment, drly compare their shuffling skills with that of their friend.

ONE LAST NOTE: Of course, since this is entirely self working, you can perform it over Zoom or any other kind of virtual performance. Just make sure that your spectator arranges the initial set up correctly.

So, there’s Squared!

Oh, before we finish this…why ‘Squared?’

What’s 4 squared?

16!

In this effect, we’re dealing with 4 piles of 4 cards each—a squared number. Hence the name 🙂

Alright, so there’s the basic effect. But that’s only the start…

See, it occurred to me that the 16 card packet we deal with in Squared is not only a ‘microcosm’ for the memorized deck in the sense that you can cut and not disturb the order, but in a bunch more ways too.

These bonus ideas are designed to explore all the other mem deck concepts packed into this humble 16 card packet.

FIRST:

The Faro

Here’s an awesome fact. 16 cards only require FOUR perfect out faros to return to their original order.

Why?

Well, there’s been a bunch of maths done on the faro shuffle, and I’m not going to pretend I understand it all…BUT…one thing I did pick up is that packets of cards with a number of cards that are powers of 2 seem to require less faros.

For example, 8 cards require 3 perfect out faros. 16 require 4 out faros. 32 cards require 5 out faros.

Again, that’s a very useful piece of information that I searched for for a while before discovering on this site:

(i then later discovered that Juan Tamariz just kinda ‘drops’ this info in a sentence on page 323 of Mnemonica)

https://blog.cinqmarsmedia.com/the-elusive-mathemagic-of-faro-shuffles-994cbdddb48b

“That means with a deck of 1 trillion, 99 billion, 511 million, 627 thousand and 776 cards, you would only need to faro shuffle it 40 times to return it to its original state. In contrast, 40 faro shuffles is the same number required to return a deck of just 188 cards back to its original state.”

Alright, that’s pretty crazy, but not all that useful for us as magicians.

Here IS a useful fact. In ‘Squared’, we only need TWO perfect out faros to get to the order we want.

That’s because we don’t WANT to get back to our original order.

After 4 out faros, we’ll be back where we started with the Jacks, Queens, Kings and Aces separated. However, after 2 out faros, we’ll have an arrangement that looks something like this:

Now we can really draw attention to the fact that we’re going to take these piles off the top of the deck in blocks of 4—just like how we started.

But how do we get to this result if we can’t do a perfect faro?

Well, I’d suggest that we revisit my ‘EZ faro’ method. With only 16 cards, this is a breeze and over very quickly. In fact, you could do this WITH your spectator.

Of course, if you CAN faro already (and even if you don’t think you can, you might be surprised at how much easier it is using just 2 packets of 8 cards) you could simply weave the cards, then spread them on the table and have your spectator ‘push’ the shuffle together—another very good way to get them involved and feeling like THEY shuffled the cards.

Either way, the whole thing is over so fast, you barely have time to say ‘faro!’

Here’s another thing:

This is also the perfect introduction to stack work, since you can easily actually end up with a memorized deck! You already know that the cards run Jack, Queen, King and then Ace. All you need to recall now is the order of the suits. If we arrange them in CHaSeD order, that’s easy enough to do.

CHaSeD = Clubs, Hearts, Spades, Diamonds.

The only caveat here is that we need to be the ones to pick up the 4 piles of cards, since we want to maintain the CHSD order of the suits. But I don’t find that to be a huge deal—especially considering that your audience doesn’t even know what you’re about to do anyway.

So, if we arrange the cards in CHSD order, we’ve built ourselves a ‘miniature memorized deck.’

It has all the properties of a regular memorized deck—we know the position of each card, and for any given position, we know the card.

(the only difference is that the ‘recall’ time will be slower for this since we need to do a little bit of counting, but that’s the only difference.)

For example, if the JH is on the face of the deck, and we wanted to know where the AS is, we’d do the following:

Figure out where the Spades are in relation to the Hearts. Using CHSD, we know the spades come straight after the hearts. And since the cards follow a repeating pattern of Jack, Queen, King, Ace, we know that the cards, from the top down, are arranged as follows:

QH (JH is on bottom, so QH MUST be on top)

We’ll stop here since AS is the card we want, and we now know where it is – the 7th card down.

What if we wanted to do the opposite—work out which card was at a given position?

Well, that wouldn’t be all that difficult either. If we wanted to work out the 12th card down, we’d flip that on its head and picture it as the 5th card up (16, 15, 14, 13, 12).

Given that we have the JH on the bottom, we know that the card before it must be an Ace. Since we also know that the suit rotation follows our CHSD order, the suit that comes before Hearts (H) must be Clubs (C).

The Anti Faro

If we’re gonna sit here and talk about how Squared can use faros, we should probably also take note of the fact it can use anti faros too.

In fact, saying ‘it CAN use anti faros’ is a bit of an understatement.

The truth is, the regular handling ALREADY uses an anti faro.

Remember how we said an antifaro works by dealing 4 piles of cards?

Well, think for a moment about what we do right at the end of Squared:

We deal 4 piles of cards!

It’s as we deal that the Four of a Kinds come together. Try it face up to see. This is, in fact, because we’re doing an antifaro!

(although we probably shouldn’t say as much out loud to the audience.)

The beautiful thing about using the anti faro in this context is that it makes perfect sense. After all, we started out with 4 piles of 4. There’s nothing fishy about returning to that state.

If we want to start getting really geeky, we could also point out how we can bring all the Four of a Kinds together either by doing two regular out faros or an ‘anti faro 2’…but they both work out the same end result.

But it’s not just limited to dealing FOUR piles of card.

Recall the regular ‘anti faro’ just consists of dealing two piles of cards?

Well, we could also introduce a moment into the routine where we tell our spectator:

“Now let’s imagine we’re playing poker together. Deal two hands, one for me and one for you. You get to decide who to deal to first.”

We can also give them the choice of how to pick up the hands. None of it really matters apart from the fact that they just performed our first ‘anti faro’ for us without realizing it!

Then once they’ve done that, we move back into the ‘shuffling’ routine (actually just a bunch of cuts) and then tell them one more time:

“Alright, one final time, deal a pair of poker hands. You get to decide who to deal to first. Think carefully about this—whatever you choose will determine how this whole thing turns out!”

When they pick up the cards, they’ve actually done the equivalent of you dealing four piles of four cards. At this point you can just push off four cards in blocks and reveal the ending.

(try this with cards in hand to see it work.)

Now that you see how this works on a surface level—remaining in order despite cutting, being perfectly optimised for faros, and holding really all the hallmark properties of a memorized deck—do you see how this starts to become pretty exciting?

The other beautiful aspect of all this is that you can explore classical memorized deck ideas FAST, since it’s so easy to work with just 16 cards. (Hence why I always call it a ‘microcosm’ of the memorized deck.)

In my eyes, it’s literally the perfect training ground for the memorized deck.

But enough theory. Let’s talk about some actual routines you can do with this bad boy…

X Marks the Spot

Here’s a cool idea I had, based on the fact that the 16 card packet you use in this is a little ‘memorized deck.’

It only requires a couple of changes to the initial handling of the routine. First, when you display the 4 piles of cards arranged by suit, ask them to just THINK of one of the cards that they see.

Now pick up the packets, keeping them face up. Start by picking up the Clubs, then laying the face up Hearts on top of them, then the Spades, then the Diamonds. Now, when you turn the entire thing face down, you’re in your CHSD order (from top down: Clubs, Hearts, Spades, Diamonds.)

Now, you proceed as normal through the ‘shuffling’ procedure as described in the basic handling.

Before you deal the cards back into piles of four, find some motivation to glimpse the bottom card.

One such reason might be to take back the cards, and then ask the spectator if they’d like to give them one more cut before you deal them out, saying:

“Or perhaps you want to move some more cards from the top…”

Display the top.

“…to the bottom?”

Turn the cards face up so that the bottom card is visible. Note this card.

Now, if they say they do want to move more cards, ask them to name a number. You can now adjust your noted card based on the number. For example, if the bottom card is the AS, and then say they DO want to move more cards—4 cards from top to bottom—you would just ‘add’ 4 cards to the AS (JD, QD, KD, AD).

(and vice versa if they wanted to move cards from the bottom to the top.)

Your new noted card is the AD.

Now, before you deal the cards you want to ask them:

“For the first time…what card are you thinking of?”

If they name the card you know is on the bottom, it’s time to do a different effect. Just give them the cards, get them to ‘focus on their card’ and then reveal that despite all their ‘shuffling’ they managed to find their card (get them to turn the deck over and reveal the card on the bottom. Shuffle the deck for real while they react so they don’t spread the cards and see that the order of cards has been retained.)

However, 15/16 of the time, they aren’t going to name the bottom card.

Let’s say they name the KC.

Now, we don’t need to do any immediate calculation. All we’re going to do is start dealing cards (or get them to deal), and as we do, we’re going to cycle through the cards in our deck—starting from the card that follows the one on the bottom (the AD).

When we deal the first card we say (in our mind, of course) ‘JC’ (Jack follows Ace, Clubs follows Diamonds.)

Second card = QC.

And as we deal the third card we say ‘KC.’

This card is their card, but we’re not going to reveal that yet. Just say:

“Hmmm. I’m not sure, but I have a feeling about this card. I’m not sure though, so for now I’ll just ‘mark’ the card so we can find it again if we need to.”

Draw a big X on the back with a sharpie. Now proceed to finish dealing through the cards relatively fast. After sufficient dramatic build up as you say that none of the other cards felt strange, ask them to ‘name their card.’

(a popular strategy at this point might be to ask “what was your card again?” as if you weren’t paying attention the first time.)

Once they name their card again, slide the card with the X out of the pile and (again, after sufficient tension has been built up) reveal that it’s their card.

But the trick ain’t over yet.

Place their face up card on top of the pile it came from, and then admit:

“I told you I wasn’t sure, so I ‘cheated’ a little…”

Now reveal that all the four Jacks came together in that pile.

“…and actually, I cheated over here too…”

Reveal another one of the piles.

“…and here…”

Another reveal.

“…and of course, over here.”

Reveal the final pile.

(note. The line about ‘cheating’ doesn’t really make much sense when you think about it logically. But, fortunately for us, spectators don’t tend to react based on logic. They react based on emotion. And there’s plenty of room for that here.)

Of course, we could reveal it in a different way. We could deal the 4 piles, swap around the piles a few times (so they don’t know which one has the ‘X’ in) and then reveal that we caused all of the cards to come together. Then we get them to point out their card, at which point we turn it over to reveal an ‘X’ on the back.

But I prefer the first reveal.

ACAAN

Let’s imagine we’ve performed all the same process as in the previous routine.

We’re right at the part where we’ve glimpsed the bottom card, and then after a sufficient time interval, have asked the spectator to name their card.

(just a reminder: they picked the KC.)

Once they name their card, we know it’s position. In this case, since the AD is on bottom, the KC is the 3rd card down from the top.

We can now ask them to name a number between 1 and 16, and then based on their answer, move a few cards to place their card in that position.

For example, let’s say they say ‘12’. Doesn’t seem like we’re all that close, does it?

But consider this:

If the KC is the 3rd card down, that means it’s actually also the 14th card up (i.e if you turned the deck face up and counted the cards, the KC would be the 14th card.)

They wanted 12, so all we’d need to do is move two cards from the top to the bottom, and we’ve placed their chosen card in the chosen position.

NOTE – when we want to count up from the bottom, I would hold the cards face down, spread the deck, and drop them from the bottom one by one. This way we don’t reveal the order of the cards.

We could even spread the cards on the table and then either count from left or right (equivalent to choosing between top or bottom.)

So because we can count from the top or the bottom, we’ll rarely need to shift more than a few cards.

We could even ask them to name ‘a number between 1 and 10’ to make things even easier.

NOTE: What I’d be the most likely to do in this particular situation (the KC 3rd card down) is ask them to give me a number ‘between 1 and 5.’ Most of the time they’ll say 3, and if not, I only need to move a couple of cards to correct. But again, most of the time they’ll say 3. And if not,

Now here’s an interesting variation:

Suppose we get them to name their card and number.

We can then ‘jazz’ it into position using the very same shuffling procedure we began with. To them, we’re just mixing the cards even more, but in reality we’re using this opportunity to ‘place’ their card exactly where they asked us to.

Let’s use the same example of placing the KC in the 12th position. We could start by holding the cards and asking ‘how many cards should we move from the top to the bottom? Give me a number between 1 and 5.’

If they say 2, obviously that’s a direct hit and you’re golden.

What if they said 1?

I’d move one card. That leaves the KC second from the top.

If they said 3, that’s also pretty golden because it means the KC is going to be the card on the face of the deck. You could turn the deck face up and reveal the KC has appeared, even after all their shuffling.

But then you could take it one step further: they named 12. Tell them that since 12 is 4 x 3, you’re going to deal 4 cards 3 times. Since the KC is the card on the face of the deck, every 4th card will also be a King. So we can deal 4 cards, place the 4th card aside, and continue. If you don’t want to do all that, you could just count 12 cards down from the top of the deck and you’ll land on another King.

If they said 4, I’d just move 4. This places the KC in the 15th position down. Now all I need is to move another 3 cards from top to bottom and the KC will be the 12th card down.

Same for 5. Moving 5 cards from top to bottom would put the KC in the 14th position. Now all I need to do is move another 2 cards from top to bottom and the KC will be 12th card down.

To do this, I might ask them to name another number.

And so the game continues…

If you don’t feel like you’re getting anywhere, just shift the cards yourself, but I think with a little creativity you can place the card in the position pretty fast, with it still feeling like the spectator is calling the shots.

Of course, these ideas don’t cover all of the possibilities—but that’s where the fun REALLY begins, because you can start playing with these ideas yourself and realising just how much flexibility this deck has.

Again, this is a really useful ‘training ground’ for understanding the mechanics of the ACAAN shift (because it’s gonna come up again when we start doing this with the full deck.)

Of course, I should mention that you could simplify this even further: they name a card and you tell them its position in the deck, then count to that position to verify. But I think the strength of that effect is much less than the previous ideas.

ONE FINAL NOTE: After you count to and reveal their card, I would gather together the rest of the deck and shuffle it as they react. This way they can examine the cards and we don’t need to worry about them spotting the order in the deck.

Full Deck Squared

Here’s something you might not have known:

If you stack your deck in Si Stebbins order and then give it two out faros, you’ll end up with all the Four of a Kinds together in your deck.

Try it. Go to https://natedog.com/cards/faro.html and select ‘Si Stebbins’ and then hit the out faro button twice.

Here’s where it gets even cooler:

You can do the SAME ‘shuffle’ procedure as you do in the main effect on the full deck, and still have this work. All you’re ever doing is cutting the cards, and as you see in that simulator, you can cut Si Stebbins as much as you want, when you give it two out faros, the cards arrange themselves.

That’s because Si Stebbins is what we call a ‘tetradistic’ stack.

Which is really a very complicated way of saying that all the values (from Ace to King) have 12 cards between them. Meaning when we do two out faros, thanks to the organised nature of the faros, all the Four of a Kinds come together.

Which, when you think about it, is a very similar thing to what we’re doing with the 16 card packet. Each card in the 16 card packet has 3 cards between them.

Doing two out faros brings those cards together.

We’ve just gone and scaled that up to the full deck.

If you try it by arranging your deck in Si Stebbins and then doing the faros, you’ll see exactly what’s going on.

I would use this as a kicker for the regular routine. Have the 16 cards on the table, briefly display the full deck, and then faro it twice before placing it aside. To their eyes, they saw you shuffle it, and you didn’t touch it between the beginning of the routine and the end.

NOTE: Since the easy faros take a moment, you might want to give yourself the time by doing the following:

Start with the Si Stebbins deck in your hands. Hand a second deck to the spectator and ask them to remove all the Jacks, Queens, Kings and Aces. As they do this, perform the easy faro twice. (if you run out of time, get them to arrange them by suit. If you really need to, get them to spend a moment thinking of a card.)

For reference, when I timed myself I took me 30 seconds to do the faro, and one minute to remove all the court cards and arrange them by suit. So there’s easily time to do two faros as they arrange the cards.

NOTE: This also means that, if you have a deck stacked in the Redford stack, you can display the deck, overhand shuffle it (this shuffle actually takes you into Si Stebbins if you know how) and then do two out faros to bring the whole deck into a ‘Squared’ arrangement.

It’s mouth watering stuff…

Card to Pocket

Returning to just the 16 cards, here’s a fun idea you probably didn’t associate with this effect, but I think could make for a nice routine.

The basic idea of most ‘card to pocket’ effects is to control the selected card to the top, then palm it out and reveal it ‘in your pocket.’

Well, using the principles we just discussed, you can control any named card to the top by either shifting cards, or ‘guiding’ the spectator to place it there themselves.

Once it’s in place, you can use your favorite palming method to steal it out. You could then either:

Instantly reveal that the named card is ‘in your pocket.’

Load it in your pocket, then count the cards to show there’s only 15, and their named card is in your pocket.

Deal the cards into four piles and reveal that all the cards have come together…except one—their named card. That card was in your pocket ‘all along.’

You can have fun with the different principles, but the basic idea is the same—we can get their card to the top of the deck pretty quickly and easily, at which point we can palm it out for use in ‘card to wallet’ or ‘card to pocket’ or any number of card to impossible locations

Mnemonicosis

Those of you who have read Mnemonica will know that one of the most powerful things you can do with a deck of cards is ‘Mnemonicosis.’

Read Mnemonica for all the subtleties, but the basic idea is that they cut the deck and you ‘jazz’ to their named card using personal information that equates to the number you want.

We can do a similar thing in our 16 card mem deck.

Let’s say I’m performing this for Jacob (or ‘Jacob Daniels’)

They’ve named the KC, which we know is the 3rd card down. I would turn the deck face up, then have them cut the deck ‘about in half.’

Let’s suppose they cut just below half and the card we see on the face of the packet they cut to is the QS.

From here, the KC is 7 cards away.

(QS -> JS -> AH -> KH -> QH -> JH -> AC -> KC)

We could ask them to name a number between 1 and 10, knowing the most likely answer is 7, and then count seven cards (keeping in mind what we talked about above about counting from the bottom up) to reveal the KC.

We could also spell ‘Daniels’ as that contains 7 letters.

Again, this is the kind of situation where I really can’t sit here and type out all the possibilities for the sheer fact that it’ll change each time you do it—but it’s another way to get comfortable with the Mnemonicosis principles without using a full deck.

Poker Deal

Here’s a super simple but fun idea. This time, we don’t need them to pick a card. But we do want to glimpse the bottom card.

Let’s say the bottom card is the JC. In this case, we only care about the value, not the suit. So we just note that the bottom card is a Jack.

After the spectator has completed the ‘shuffling’ procedure, we can ask them to name any value—Jack, Queen, King or Ace.

Let’s say they name Ace.

We know that the Jack is on the bottom, which means the first ace is 3 cards down (so if we were to deal 4 hands, the Aces will fall to the third player.)

We tell them we’ll deal 4 poker hands. Do they want to be hand 1, 2, 3 or 4?

If they say 3, you’re golden—that’s where the Aces are going to fall anyway.

If they say 1, you need to move two cards from the top to bottom (placing the Ace in first position.) If they say 2, you need to move 1 card from the top to the bottom (placing the Ace in second position.) If they say 4, you need to move

Either way, you’re only ever going to need to shift a few cards and you’ll be able to deal that spectator all four cards of their named value.

Once you deal, I would collect all the other hands and shuffle them, saying:

“Your hand is the only one we care about.”

In reality, you want to disguise the fact that all the other hands are also Four of a Kinds.

Now you can have them turn over their cards and see that, despite their extensive ‘shuffling’, you were able to deal them a Four of a Kind in the value they named.

What skill you must have! (if only they knew)

Now, some people might see it the other way (as Jacob points out in the Live Session) and decide to keep the other hands there. Once they reveal the Aces, they can reveal that not only did they deal the spectator a Four of a Kind—they dealt EVERYONE a Four of a Kind. This might work well if you’re actually performing for 4 spectators and you can get them involved too. This can be especially effective if they named any of the other three values, as we can reveal that although they got a Four of a Kind, the ‘real winner is Spectator 2 (use their name here) with the four aces!’

You decide. But either way, I think there’s some fun possibilities.

Oil and Water

Here’s another consideration. In this effect, our starting setup is going to differ slightly. We arrange the cards so that they alternate between red and black. Now we can spread them briefly face up to show the cards are ‘mixed’ without focusing overt attention on it.

We can proceed through our ‘shuffle’ procedure as usual. Now, if we give the deck two out faros (using our easy method or a regular handling) the reds and blacks will separate.

So we can have them ‘shuffle’ and then assist us in the faro shuffle…only to reveal that they managed to shuffle the two colors apart.

If we do the faro and then spread the cards and have them ‘push’ them together, it really feels like we’re completely shuffling the cards—when actually, it’s this very shuffle that is needed to bring the colors together! I love it.

I think the best way of handling this is to introduce a couple of false cuts after the faro—so we don’t immediately reveal the colors have separated immediately after the faro. If we then get them to perform the Jay Ose triple false cut (see Module 3 ‘false shuffles’ section) a couple of times, it means they’re less likely to associate the colors separating with the faro shuffle.

Out of This World

Of course, we could perform the above procedure WITHOUT revealing that the colors have separated. If we keep the cards face down, the spectator has no way of knowing that the cards are separated by color. To them, we’ve just mixed the deck thoroughly.

Now we can launch into an ‘Out of This World’ routine, leveraging the fact that the reds and blacks are separated.

Most handlings of OOTW will be compatible with the setup you find yourself in at this point, but here’s a very simple one:

Take a red card and black card from the rest of the deck (the cards not in use) and lay them on the table face up. Tell the spectator to deal cards they think are black onto the black card, and cards they think are red onto the red card.

Once they deal 8 cards, we’ll know they’ve exhausted the first color.

At this point, remove another two cards from the remainder of the deck—one red and one black.

Tell them “we’ll make things even harder” by placing the face up red card on the pile that started on the black face up card, and vice versa. Now tell them to deal red cards on top of the face up red card, and black cards on top of the face up black card.

At the end you’ll be left in either of these situations (the exact number of cards might be different, but the color separation will be the same)…

Scenario 1:

PILE ONE: PILE TWO:

R (face up) B (face up)

B B

B (face up) R (face up)

R R

Scenario 2:

PILE ONE: PILE TWO

R (face up) B (face up)

R R

B (face up) R (face up)

B B

You’ll know which of these scenarios is the case, because you’ll have previously glimpsed the bottom card.

As you can see, in either of the scenarios, one pile is already ‘done.’ You can hand that one to the spectator and ask them to ‘turn it over’ but not spread yet.

You then take the other pile and turn it over—but in the process you steal the bottom card to the top.

As you can see by looking at the table I made above, if you were to move the bottom card to the top, you’d be set for the reveal.

Which move you use to accomplish this is up to you, but I do the following:

Hold the packet in your left hand. Get a break above the bottom card. Slide the rest of the deck forward with your right hand in overhand grip. Once the cards are jutting out from your hand, move your right hand so you’re holding the cards with thumb on top and first finger below and flip the cards face up back into the hand in almost a ‘sweeping’ motion. This hides the face up card in your hand and moves it from the bottom to the top.

(video of this below)

You can then get the spectator to spread their pile—they’ll see that the blacks and reds are separated, and if they turn over the two face down cards they’ll see that they also match the color they’re alongside.

When you spread your deck, the colors will also be separate. You want to spread your deck almost as an afterthought—the focus should be on revealing their hand. This helps misdirect from the fact there’s only one face down card in your cards. So spread as they react to their own pile, and once you’ve done so, turn the face down card in the center face up to complete the picture.

If you have an alternate handling of Out of This World that you prefer, feel free to ‘plug it in’ in place of this one.

Card location

Just because it would be a shame not to mention it, here’s a very basic idea you could use based on the division between red and black.

Spread the cards and let them pick one, noting whether it comes from the top 8 or bottom 8. Then have them return the card to the opposite half. Now, when you look at the faces of the cards (keeping them hidden from the spectator) their card will be either the only red card in the black half or the only black card in the red half.

Color Sense

Let’s move on from just using the 16 court cards and consider the type of effect we might be able to achieve using 16 random cards.

Or at least, 16 cards that LOOK like random cards.

You may have already guessed what those cards really are…

The first 16 cards of our memorized deck!

The benefit of using these cards is that we can start by spreading the cards face up on the table, and there’s no pattern to see.

We can then perform the ‘shuffle’ procedure without changing the cyclical order of our memorized packet. If we then give the cards 4 out faros, we won’t disturb the order of our memorized deck.

So we can ‘shuffle’ and then do 4 out faros and still be in memorized order.

This opens up a bunch of possibilities.

Here’s one of them…

Color Sense.

One of the most ‘classic’ effects you can do with a packet of cards is to shuffle them, hand them to your spectator to hold un

Pit Hartling has a wonderful method for this effect in his ‘Card Fictions’, but here’s a very easy method that utilises the concepts we’ve just been discussing:

Start with the first 16 cards of your memorized deck. Spread them to show that they’re shuffled. Then let your spectator perform the ‘shuffle’ procedure. Do two out faros. Get the spectator to ‘shuffle’ some more. Do two more out faros.

You’re now back in memorized order and all you need to do is glimpse the bottom card. You can do this using one of the methods discussed in Module 3.

Alternatively, you could openly glimpse the top cad as you say the following:

“You’re going to hold the cards beneath the table, and I’m going to try to ‘sense’ the color of each card. When I do, take the card out and lay it face up on the table to see if I was right.”

As you say so, turn over the top card and lay it face up on the table. Once you see this, you’re set. You can either leave the card there, or place it back on the deck and say “the first round is just a practice run, since we both know the card.”

Your job from here on out is easy—you just go through your memorized order and call out the color of that card. As you progress through the cards, you can start revealing more information about the cards, like:

“This one’s a high card too.”

“I think this one’s a Club.”

“I think this one might be a Queen.”

And then for the final card, whichever card that happens to be, reveal the complete identity.

“The 7 of Diamonds!”

This way you build progression into the routine and give it a better dramatic structure.

Here’s an example. If we were using Mnemonica stack and the top card is the 2S, we know:

The next card is red (QH)
Then red again (3D)
Then black (QC)
Then red (8H)
Then black (6S)
Then black (5S)
Then black (4C)
Then red (2H)

Notice how, once we reach the 16th card, we jump back to 1—because of the cyclical nature of the memorized packet.

NOTE: We could also do any of the ‘X marks the spot’ ‘ACAAN’ stuff with these 16 cards too.

NOTE: The only difference between the above and what I go over in the Live Session is that in the session I recommend cutting the first card of your memorized order back to the top before the faros. This is a good tip for people newer to the stack who want the stability of going from 1-16, but as long as you’re comfortable with the stack you don’t need to cut the first card back to the top. That’s because, the 1-16 card acts like a regular stack in that it cycles, so as I explained, if the top card is the 2S, we just go all the way to 16 and then jump back to 1. And doing the four faros won’t change that, since doing 4 faros just brings us back to our original order. (in this case our original order is with the 2S on top, and the rest of the cards following the memorized order.)

Total Coincidence

Alright, this is getting ridiculous now. There’s just SO much we can do with these principles.

But we could be here all day, so let’s end it on this one.

It’s definitely one of the wilder uses of this idea, but I think it’s pretty cool.

Here’s what happens:

We’ll use the first 16 cards of our memorized order. Now remove the ‘mates’ of all the cards in that memorized order and ‘mirror’ them onto the stack.

So we’ll have:

4C, 2H, 7D, 3C, 4H, 6D, AS, 5H, 9S, 2S, QH, 3D, QC, 8H, 6S, 5S, 5C, 6C, 8D, QS, 3H, QD, 2C, 9C, 5D, AC, 6H, 4D, 3S, 7H, 2D, 4S.

What we’ve actually done is create what we call a ‘stay stack’ where the second half is a mirror image of the first, just with the mates of the card.

Now we’re going to remove all the red cards from the above stay stack and place them in their own pile, so we’ll end up with the following two piles:

BLACK: 4C, 3C, AS, 9S, 2S, QC, QS, 2C, 9C, AC, 3S, 4S

RED: 2H, 7D, 4H, 6D, 5H, QH, 3D, 3H, QD, 5D, 6H, 4D, 7H, 2D

If you look at those arrangements, you’ll see that BOTH the stacks are stay-stacks. Now, we’re going to place those on top of each other, keeping a break between.

NOTE: Incidentally, since we’re now using 32 cards, we could do 5 out faros and retain this order. See how these techniques ‘stack’ on top of each other? (Pun most definitely intended.)

You then ask a spectator to shuffle and split the deck for them. Get them to riffle shuffle the cards together.

Now we can do the ‘shuffle’ procedure.

Once we have, we’re going to do something downright devious…

Ask them to name a color. Pick up the cards and spread them. Just before you start removing cards of that color, cut the first card of whichever color they DIDN’T name to the top (4C for the black, 2H for the red.)

Now, whichever color they named, go through the deck and remove all the cards of that color.

What you’ve actually done in that procedure is UNDO their shuffle. They shuffled the two colors together, and you’ve just gone through and openly separated them! But it’s justified, because it was their choice of color (although that makes no difference to us.)

Make sure, when you’re removing the cards of one color:

if you go through the deck from right to left (bottom to top), turn the cards face down as you place them in a pile (this ensures you don’t reverse the order.)
If you go through the deck from left to right (top to bottom), place the cards down on the table in a pile face up (ensuring you don’t reverse the order.)

If they’ve done a particularly bad riffle shuffle, go through the cards with the faces toward yourself so the patterns aren’t obvious.

At the end, you’ll be back where you started, with two stay stacks of different colors.

Place the packet of cards with the color they didn’t touch to the side.

Give them the packet of cards with the color they did pick.

Now we’re going to do the ‘shuffle’ procedure (and 4 out faros if we want, but that’s optional at this point.)

Now take the cards back and cut the cards so the 2H is at the top. Then cut in half, between the two 8s. (the faces should be hidden from the spectator.)

Give your spectator the top half, and keep the other half for yourself.

Spread the spectator’s half and have them remove one card. Cut at that point and glimpse the bottom card, but keep a break between the halves. Since their cards are in stack, this will tell you the identity of their card.

NOTE: Remember to ‘skip’ the black cards since we removed them. So if we see the 6D on the bottom, their can’t is the 5H (not the AS.)

Now have them place their card back on top and give the deck a couple of cuts.

Next, get them to spread through the cards and turn their chosen card face down wherever it is in the cards, then place the cards face up on the table.

Note what card is on the face. Let’s say it’s the 3D. We can now work out the position of their card by working backward. We know their half is in stack. So we can, in our mind, work from the face up card and into the deck by going backward through the stack:

3D -> QH -> 5H

In this case, their card is 3 cards deep into the face up portion.

(we could also work this out by referring to our cards—since they’re a mirror image of their cards we could work backward by counting the distance between the 3 and the 5 in our hands. But we need to count moving down through the deck, not up, since it’s a mirror image. Don’t worry if that doesn’t make sense to you. You can use the above method just fine.)

We’re now going to spread our cards in front of ourselves, ‘pick’ one, and reverse it in our deck. Obviously, we’re going to reverse the mate of their card, and place it at the same number. In our deck, the 5D is 5 cards down. So we’ll cut so the 4D is on the face, which places the 5D 3rd. We now turn the 5D face down and place our cards on the table face up.

There’s now going to be three main ‘reveals.’

First reveal: the mate. Both of you hold the cards face up and deal through the deck. Surprisingly, you’ll both come across a face down card at the same time. When you turn over the face down card, it’s a perfect match. The other nice thing is since your deck is a mirror, none (or most) of the other card won’t match—this will make reveal 3 more powerful.

But you can actually use this to set up for the third reveal in advance. As they deal cards, have them lift the card from the face up portion and place it to the side, creating a new pile. As they deal through their deck, they’ll reverse the order.

In your own hands, count them from one hand to the other without reversing the order.

After they stop on the mate and you reveal that, quickly deal through the rest of their cards in this manner.

Since you started out with your deck as a ‘mirror’ image of theirs, by reversing the order of their cards, you’ve made a perfect match. Now just note which card is one the face of their packet and cut that card to the face of yours. Now put both the packets aside face down. You’ll be coming back to them in the third reveal.

Second reveal: the cards you placed aside at the beginning (that they remember shuffling) are also perfect matches of each other. That’s because, when you cut the first card of the non-named color to the top, you reset the stay stack for that color.

To see this reveal live in action head here:

2:57:05 in the LIVE SESSION.

If you rewatch a couple of times you’ll see what I’m doing is just displaying the bottom card of one packet and the top card of a different packet.

Alternatively, you could overhand shuffle run 8 cards, reversing their order, then split the packet in half and reveal the matching cards. (note – you could do this overhand shuffle as you place the cards aside in the beginning.)

Third reveal: return to the two packets you placed aside after the first reveal. Turn them face up and rapidly deal through them to reveal the perfect match.

NOTE: I came up with this when I saw Juan do something that looked like this in a performance of ‘Total Coincidence.’ Since I haven’t read Sonata, I don’t know if he uses this, but I figured he did.

NOTE: I know this routine is a bit of a beast to wrap your head around. Read this explanation in combination with the video demo in the Live Session for the best summary of it. Reread it with cards in hand and follow along. It’s complex, but absolutely worth it for the three phase kicker reveal. And it’s actually a pretty snappy routine, you can do it fast.

NOTE: Some people might not want to use the first 16 cards in case their audience starts to get familiar with them. Perhaps use a random spread like 20-36. Or use a different stack to the one you usually perform with.

Alright, well that was one meaty discussion…all about how a simple faro in combination with a 16 card packet can create a huge range of effects and ideas!

Let’s now ‘zoom out’ of our 16 card packet and back into the deck as a whole.

In the next section, we’ll talk about my ‘faro wheel’ and some pretty nifty things you can do with it…

Module 4 – Part 5: So simple you’ll fool yourself…

Module 4 – Part 5: So simple you’ll fool yourself…

Benji

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