I enjoyed our recent faro explorations so much that I decided, over the next few weeks, I’ll take it even deeper…
See, the rules we were operating by for the previous 3 effects were wonderful things—but they applied specifically to a 52 card deck.
I figured that, since we can use the faro with other sized decks, why not go about setting up some new rules for those decks?
Okay.
Don’t worry if all that sounded like gobbledygook.
It’s all explained in this week’s Inner Circle piece…
Let me backtrack.
We all know, by now, that giving a 52 card deck EIGHT faro shuffles will bring it back to its original state.
(hence the eight shuffle charts we had so much fun with last time.)
But what you may NOT know is that:
- A 32 card deck requires FIVE faro shuffles to come full circle
- A 16 card deck requires FOUR faro shuffles to come full circle
- An 8 card deck requires THREE faro shuffles to come full circle
- A 4 card deck requires FOUR faro shuffles to come full circle
Notice how the above are all powers of two?
(a fact pointed out in Mnemonica by Tamariz, although the math isn’t explained in there. For the math – go here: https://blog.cinqmarsmedia.com/the-elusive-mathemagic-of-faro-shuffles-994cbdddb48b?gi=2cceaa02e3c6)
If you’re like me, you might have innocently suspected that since 52 cards require eight faro shuffles, 26 cards require four faro shuffles.
But that’s far from the case, as the above blog post demonstrates.
However, fortunately for us, we don’t need to know the math—we just need to thank our lucky stars that it lines up so nicely for us with the 32 and 16 card packets.
(I figured a packet of 8 cards seems a little small, so I’ll be focusing on what we can explore with a 16 and 32 card packet.)
So my goal, when I delved into this, was to see if I could come up with a ‘Fingertip Fumble’ or two for a 32 card packet (or 16 card packet) given that it’s possible to chart the faro shuffles for these packets, much like how Expert Card Technique charted the faro shuffles for 52 cards.
Now that we’re both on the same page, I figured we’d kick this party off by laying out the ‘rules’ for these new numbers.
I did so by picking up my number deck, grabbing the top 32 cards, and faro shuffling them five times.
Each time, I noted down the order of the numbers.
Of course, since I’m going to be using a memorized deck when it comes to the effects for this stuff, the numbers below can be ‘translated’ into their associated card.
(I told you this week was gonna be a real ‘nerdfest.’)
Here’re the results:
Original state: 1-32
First faro: 1, 17, 2, 18, 3, 19, 4, 20, 5, 21, 6, 22, 7, 23, 8, 24, 9, 25, 10, 26, 11, 27, 12, 28, 13, 29, 14, 30, 15, 31, 16, 32
Second faro: 1, 9, 17, 25, 2, 10, 18, 26, 3, 11, 19, 27, 4, 12, 20, 28, 5, 13, 21, 29, 6, 14, 22, 30, 7, 15, 23, 31, 8, 16, 24, 32
Third faro: 1, 5, 9, 13, 17, 21, 25, 29, 2, 6, 10, 14, 18, 22, 26, 30, 3, 7, 11, 15, 19, 23, 27, 31, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32
Fourth faro: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32
Fifth faro: 1-32
Interesting stuff, but before we get caught up in it, let’s do the same for the 16 card packet.
Thankfully, this was much faster to put together…
Original state: 1-16
First faro: 1, 9, 2, 10, 3, 11, 4, 12, 5, 13, 6, 14, 7, 15, 8, 16
Second faro: 1, 5, 9, 13, 2, 6, 10, 14, 3, 7, 11, 15, 4, 8, 12, 16
Third faro: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16
Fourth faro: 1-16
Useful stuff, huh?
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll show you how to use the above knowledge to perform some gnarly stunts and effects with the pasteboards.
Speak then,
Benji