A few weeks ago I showed you a simple way to perform the ‘most powerful effect in magic’ after the audience ‘mix’ the deck.
This week, I’ll show you how to perform the ACAAN effect even after you shuffle the cards.
A few of you that are familiar with my preferences may have a suspicion or two about the method I’ll be employing today.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
…it’s faro shuffle time, baby.
Let me reacquaint you with one of the most useful diagrams in magic, found on page 146 of Expert Card Technique:
Let’s suppose we’ve been performing a whole handful of classic memorized deck effects, and so we’re in ‘original order’ right now.
Right in front of our audience, we can shuffle the deck, and still be ready to bust out the ACAAN effect.
How?
We’re simply going to give the deck ONE out-faro shuffle (using either the regular method or our ‘easy’ handling as seen in Module 4 of the Skyscraper Method.)
Once we do, we’ll find ourselves in the ‘1st Shuffle’ position, as denoted in the chart above.
Here are the steps we’ll follow to pull off this effect smoother than George Clooney robs a casino:
- Ask our spectator to name a number
Simple stuff so far.
- Once they do, we’re going to do ONE simple piece of maths on it
Don’t let that scare you. It’s a very simple calculation.
Here it is…
If they name an ODD number, do the following:
Add 1 to their number and divide by 2.
If they said 13, add 1 to get 14 and divide by 2 to get 7.
This tells us that the card now in the 13th position is card #7 in our memorized order.
(you can verify that that is indeed the case on the chart above.)
If they name an EVEN number, do the following:
Divide their number by 2, and shift one card from the bottom to the top.
If they said 14, divide that by 2 to get 7 and then shift one card from the bottom to the top. This places card #7 in our memorized order in position 14.
Those are the two ‘rules’ to remember.
Fortunately, they’re not all that complex.
Back to the steps…
- Force the card in a second deck
Based on our previous calculation, we know which card is in the named position. We now simply force that card in a second stack.
For example, if they named 13, we calculated that card #7 in our stack is in the 13th position.
In the Mnemonica stack, card #7 is the AS.
In a second deck (preferably also stacked to keep this easy), we estimation cut the AS to the top and then force it using any force you like.
- In the first deck, have the spectator count down the number they chose, and they’ll land on the named card
Once again, there’s not much more to it than that!
So there you have it—a simple way to perform the ACAAN effect even after genuinely shuffling the deck.
NOTE: Of course, you should have been false shuffling the deck plenty previously, but the benefit of the faro shuffle is that you can faro shuffle the cards and then get the audience to ‘help’ you push them together. Which of course gives you a reason to come back to them later and remind them that THEY ‘shuffled’ the deck for you.