Imagine this…
You hand the deck out to various audience members, who each genuinely shuffle. You then take the cards back and shuffle further. Next, an audience member cuts the deck as many times as they like. Once they’re satisfied, they look at the top card and bury it somewhere in the middle of the deck, and then cut the deck some more.
It seems impossible, yet once you take back the deck, you find the exact card the spectator chose (even though they never name it aloud!)
All of the above is explained in this week’s Inner Circle content.
The ‘2 second summary’ of the Marlo version is that it sets up the Spades at certain locations in the deck, which it uses to track the movement of any given card.
But we don’t need to worry about that, because we have an even easier (and more fooling) version that will let us hand the deck out to be shuffled and examined…
Here are the steps:
- Start in stack
Any stack will do, but for the purpose of this explanation, I’ll assume we’re in Mnemonica.
If you’re already in stack thanks to previous effects, great.
If not, you don’t even need to set up the full stack—just the first 13 cards of the stack.
- Hand out the deck to be shuffled
Here’s where things get fun.
We’re going to use one of my favorite ruses—the idea of ‘separate shuffling’ to maintain certain cards.
We can start by genuinely shuffling the bottom three-quarters of the deck, maintaining the 13 card block on top.
Then we cut the top 13 cards and hand them to spectator #1, and instruct him to shuffle thoroughly (little does he know that it doesn’t matter how much he shuffles, the cards in his hand will always be cards 1-13 of our stack…)
We then spread another 13 cards and hand them to the next spectator. I would use Elmsley’s 3-3-2-2 count (or is it 3-2-3-2…I always forget) to make sure it doesn’t look like you’re counting. In our case, we want to give them 13 cards so we might push off 3-3-2-2-3.
(this simply means we push a block of 3 cards, then another 3, then 2, then 2, then 3—which enables us to separate 13 cards without it being completely obvious we’re counting 13 cards one by one.)
For the last two spectators, we can just give them roughly half—they don’t need 13 each. Between them, they’ll have 26, and that’s what we’ll need later.
- Retrieve the packets in THIS order…
Take back the first packet, and the second packet.
Here comes the important part:
IN FARO the first packet into the second. This will put the first 13 cards of our stack at locations 2, 4, 6, 8, etc.
Now we take the two packets back from the other two spectators and IN FARO the packet with our memorized cards into the other 26.
This positions the first 13 cards of our stack at locations 4, 8, 12, 16, etc.
Essentially, although as far as the audience can tell all we’ve done is hopelessly mix the deck, we’ve positioned the first 13 cards of our stack at every 4th card in the deck.
Now, let me make it clear:
Our 13 memorized cards won’t be in ORDER. We might have the QH at position 4, the 6D at 8, and the 4C at 12. However, every 4th card will be ONE of our 13 memorized cards—and that’s good enough for this effect.
- Let them select a card
At this point, they can cut the deck as many times as they like. Once they’re done, they look at the top card and bury it somewhere in the deck. They can then cut the deck a few more times.
- Reveal their selection
Our job is now pretty simple.
We simply take back the cards and spread through them. Wherever we find two of our memorized 13 cards separated by FOUR cards rather than three, we know one of those four cards is the chosen card.
(and where the two memorized cards are separated by TWO is where the card was taken from.)
Now we just need to ask one or two ‘fishing’ questions to determine the identity of the card.
For example, if the 4 cards are the 5D, KS, QD, 7H, we might ask:
“Your card, was it red?”
If no…remove the KS, as that must be their card.
If yes…we then ask:
“Was it Diamonds?”
If no…remove the 7H, as that must be their card.
“It’s a face card, right?”
If no…remove the 5D, that must be their card.
If yes…remove the QD, that must be their card.
Either way, in many cases, we simply need them to say ‘no’ once before we know the card. And if we make sure we’re asking in a hesitant, probing way like we’re struggling to break through into their mind, it’s all just a part of the process (and may even add to the believability if you do it right.)
- The one caveat
There’s one exception to the above rule.
What if the card they chose was one of the 13 memorized cards?
If the card they chose was one of the 13 memorized cards, our job is actually pretty simple. Wherever we find one of our 13 memorized cards is one of the four cards, that must be the chosen card.
Great effect, right?
I encourage you to pick up Marlo’s ‘Faro Notes’ if you haven’t yet…it’s bursting with ideas like this one.