Module 7- Part 2: Unlocking Your Horizon…
Benji
Unlocking Your Horizon…
Do one thing for me:
Close your eyes and picture a skyscraper.
Now open them.
Tell me…
Did you picture a skyscraper in the middle of the desert?
Or did you picture a skyscraper in the middle of a city, surrounded by other skyscrapers?
This isn’t a trick question.
See, the fact of the matter is—skyscrapers aren’t meant to exist in isolation.
If you were to go to all the trouble of building a skyscraper, you wouldn’t just drop it in the middle of a field in Texas.
Of course not!
So where does a skyscraper really belong?
Alongside OTHER skyscrapers!
I have the same attitude toward the memorized deck.
I think your stack shouldn’t exist in isolation—I think it deserves to live within its own ‘city’ of memorized decks.
That means:
You need to work with MULTIPLE stacks (the more the merrier!)
There are so many benefits to this that it’s ridiculous:
See, so many people are just trying to one-up each other like “my stack does this” and “well, my stack does THIS” and it’s just this big ego contest.
I have a much easier time of it.
If I see something I like, I just add that stack to my ‘city.’
Not enough people think about what’s possible if they did the same thing.
Rather than arguing all day about which stack is best, I just add each one I like to my ‘city’ of stacks.
(Call me greedy, but I want them ALL!)
Likewise, when new books come out from magicians publishing their incredible work with a new stack—many magicians instantly default into debates about ‘this stack vs this stack’ and ‘is this new stack better than this stack?’
Me?
I don’t care! Let’s just throw it in the mix and grow our city even more!
It amazes me that even within the ‘advanced’ memorized deck groups I’m a part of, I still see people asking questions like:
“I heard X stack is good. I’m currently using Y stack. Should I switch over?”
I’m sorry…what??
Would you spend millions of dollars building a skyscraper, then the instant you discover a better blueprint, tear down your first skyscraper to build the second?
No!
You’d just build another skyscraper!
It’s simple.
Rather than constantly ‘tearing down’ and ‘switching’ our stack, we should just ‘build’ more—and use them all!
I’ve seen mention that perhaps one or two of the ‘greats’ have a couple of stacks—but I’m talking more than that.
It blows my mind that more people don’t do this.
For me, this is simply the natural and logical next step.
You’re learned one stack—great, now onto the next!
Each stack you learn bumps up the power of your overall ‘city.’
Think about it:
If you just add ONE new stack to your repertoire, you instantly more or less DOUBLE your chances of a ‘direct hit’ on many of your effects.
(but we’ll talk a little more about that later.)
Look:
If, by now, you’re convinced that a stack is the most powerful tool in magic (and I hope, if you ARE this far—you do think so)…
…think about how powerful it would be to have FOUR stacks.
Or, heck, EIGHT!
Or TWELVE!
Sound impossible?
That’s why I wanted to ‘preface’ this entire section with the 4-minute mile stuff. Because, although this might sound physically impossible—the only barrier is mental.
And once you overcome it, a whole new level of memorized deck magic awaits.
So, how do you do it?
Well, the memorisation aspect is just the same as ever.
We use the PAO system along with a memory palace to commit each subsequent stack to memory.
You might be worried that your memory palaces will ‘blend’ with each other.
Of course, this is a real danger—but only if you use the SAME memory palace for each deck.
Rather, you’ll want to use a new memory palace for each stack.
You could use:
- Schools
- Workplaces
- A friend’s house
- A commute
- A walk you go on
Anything will do, as long as you can clearly and easily visualise it in your mind, and assign a number to each point in the location.
Once you have this, construct the stacks using the PAO method we discussed in Module 1.
I wouldn’t recommend trying to add all the stacks I suggest in one go. Rather, build your city one skyscraper at a time.
Make sure you really memorize each stack before you add in the next.
You might be worried that learning one stack will ‘cloud’ your knowledge of the other. What if one blends into the other?
I had a similar concern when I started to learn French. I already spoke pretty decent Spanish, and I wanted to learn another language.
At first, I was worried that words would become jumbled, and I wouldn’t know which word was from which language.
This didn’t happen.
In my mind, the two things were just totally separate.
It’s the same with the stacks.
It’s not a case of remembering that the ‘JS = 45 and 1’ but that the ‘Tamariz JS = 45’ and the ‘Aronson JS = 1.’
That one distinction is a big deal. Because you can differentiate between ‘Tamariz JS’ and ‘Redford JS’ a lot easer than two versions of just the ‘JS.’
Furthermore, some people might worry that the ‘images’ in their memory palaces might overlap.
Two answers to that:
- That happens a lot less than you think. There are a LOT of ways to combine a deck of cards, and each stack will give you very different images. For nearly two months, I memorized a deck of cards every day. Most of them I didn’t bother turning inot long term memory—I just did it to strengthen the muscle. But I never had an issue with repeating images.
- Even if that does happen, it doesn’t matter. As long as the images are in different memory palaces, there’s a clear distinction between them.
Which stacks should I learn?
By now, you should have a rough idea for where my preferences lie.
But here’s a very handy (and familiar!) acronym that should give you an idea which stacks I recommend learning.
The word is…
Skyscrapers.
Or, more specifically, SkyScrApeRS.
The first S stands for ‘Spanish stack’—in other words, the Tamariz stack, Mnemonica. (And yes, I’m aware Woody Aragon is Spanish too, but Mnemonica is the face of the Spanish stack work.)
The second S stands for ‘Simon Aronson’—or in other words, the Aronson stack.
The A stands for ‘Aragon’—or in other words, the Woody Aragon stack, Memorandum.
The R stands for ‘Redford’—or in other words, the Redford stack (from Patrick Redford.)
The final S stands for ‘Supplementary Stacks’—in other words, any further stacks you decide to delve into.
Here are a couple of ideas for such ‘Supplementary Stacks:’
- New Deck Order
We’re starting easy here, because the NDO is a stack that you won’t even need to memorise—so this is a ‘freebie.’
However, if used correctly it can be powerful. You’ll need some seriously convincing false shuffles to hide it, but being able to end by revealing that NDO is a strong finish.
We’ve also seen how my ‘Sliced Bread’ can take us from a shuffled looking deck (faro 3) into NDO, so that technique could also be employed.
- NDO after one faro
Again, a lot easier to learn, but can be powerful when used right, and looks more shuffled than NDO (obviously.) Especially considering the fact that with a single anti-faro we can bring it back to NDO.
- Random order
Some magicians advise you to shuffle a deck into a random order and then learn that order, and make THAT your stack.
Now, I don’t think that’s a good idea for your FIRST stack (if you’re going to learn one, you might as well use one with built in effects and poker deals), however it is a great idea for one of your ‘supplementary stacks.’
The extra benefit of this is that it will be harder for other magicians to detect that you’re using a stack—because this is a stack that only you know.
- Hybrid stack
Combine stacks you already know into a new stack. For example, the first card is the first card from Tamariz. The second card is the second card from Aronson. The third card is the third card from Aragon. The fourth card is the fourth card from Redford. And so on. You might have to rejig one or two cards if they pop up twice, but this is another way to leverage stacks you already know to speed up how long it takes you to get comfortable with another.
- Reverse stacks
Of course, we can take all the stacks we’ve already discussed and reverse them, so they run from 52-1 rather than 1-52.
This means, in all the cases where we previously ‘counted up’ the deck, we could use this deck to ‘count down’ (which is a stronger way of doing it, I feel.)
Furthermore, we can create a ‘siamese stay stack’ by cutting the reverse stack in half and combining it with its reversed half in the original stack.
(so we would have a deck that runs 1-26 and then 26-1, for example)
These could be spread alongside the stack, and at a glance they would like different (as long as you’ve cut them so the top and bottom cards aren’t mirrored).
And they don’t require any extra memorization.
The only downside to these ‘reverse’ stacks is that they don’t increase your chances for effects like ACAAN (because they’re just a mirror of the original stack, the cards they can reach are the same), but since they take literally zero extra effort to memorize, it’s ‘leaving money on the table’ not to consider them.
- Si Stebbins
You might be wondering why I haven’t mentioned the Si Stebbins stack, since it’s such a classic stack.
Truth is, I don’t NEED to.
The Redford stack can transform into the Si Stebbins stack with just one overhand shuffle procedure (see Temporarily Out of Order for this.)
- Eight Kings
Why not? It’s easier to memorize thanks to its associated phrase.
“Eight Kings threatened to save ninety-five queens for one sick knave”
This encodes the information:
8, King, 3, 10, 2, 7, 9, 5, Queen, 4, Ace, 6, Jack.
And the suit rotation follows our standard CHSD pattern.
This is the stack Chan Canasta used, so it can certainly work wonders in the right hands!
- Faros
If you take the Tamariz stack and faro it 8 times, you essentially create another 7 stacks.
This means we could cycle between memorized decks in the process of faroing.
(another side benefit of this is that it would make our ‘Fingertip Fumbles’ even easier!)
NOTE: Here’s another benefit I didn’t even mention:
If someone destroys one stack, you can easily ‘swap in’ another.
NOTE: Of course, I only add a skyscraper to the city if it’s actually any good. If someone puts out a new book, and the stack inside it is bad, I’m not going to add it.
Now, all this might be sounding a little ‘wacky’ and ‘conceptual’, and not at all practical.
So let me show you an effect that leverages this very idea (multiple stacks) that is absolutely practical.
This effect is, without a doubt, the effect I am the proudest of.
Of everything I’ve created, this one is the best.
Now that you’re sufficiently ‘hyped’, let’s take a look at it…