Module 2 – Part 5: How I ‘fake’ my way to cardshark level skill…
Benji
How I ‘fake’ my way to cardshark level skill…
- The Technical.
Display stunning skill with playing cards—even when you have NONE at all! The memorized deck is like ‘cheat codes’ for sleight of hand demonstrations.
Alright, here’s a category very close to my heart.
I’ve always wanted people to THINK I was an expert sleight of hand artist—but I never had the ‘goods’ to back up that claim.
When I discovered the memorized deck, I was thrilled to find out that I could perform routines that seem to rely on cardshark level moves without actually being a cardshark!
With the memorized deck, you can (among MUCH more) apparently control named cards to certain locations, pluck four of a kind out of the deck, and deal winning poker hands at a whim.
Here’s a couple of great case studies that’ll show you just how cool this stuff is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEIRPYI9wb0&t=1s
See that?
Darwin is one of the best card handlers in the world. He’s as close as you get to the ‘real thing.’
Scratch that—he IS the real thing.
And while it might entertain his ego to try and pull off that kind of thing using sleight of hand alone, the memorized deck makes it so stunning that there’s no better option.
That’s why many people pick up a memorized deck—to do stuff like you just saw. Direct, hard-hitting magic that gives you an aura of legendary skill.
(note – the effect above appears in Darwin’s book Scams and Fantasies with Cards.)
Now, no discussion of the memorized deck would be complete without a poker demonstration. Here’s my personal favorite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1PuKN-w4-s
A lot of people might not immediately think of poker routines when they heard the words ‘memorized deck.’
Instead, they’ll probably imagine some kind of move-monkey card cheat procedure.
Sure, in cases, that works.
But I find that the memorized deck offers the best of both worlds—it LOOKS like you’re some kind of cardshark, but in reality, anyone with a basic level of skill with playing cards could do it.
(The routine above appears in ‘In Order To Amaze’ by Pit Hartling.)
We’ll be talking more about poker deals later in the course, but I should point out that they are definitely not the only example of the ‘technical’ view—far from it!
For example, here’s one of my effects that makes you LOOK like an expert card handler.
As ever, it uses a memorized deck instead 🙂
Official Effect: Ninja Warrior
Imagine this:
Your spectator names ANY card in the deck.
You cut the deck a couple of times, and pick up a face-up Joker that you left on the table beforehand.
As you dribble the cards with your right hand, you throw the joker into the deck with unnerving speed and accuracy.
When you spread the cards, the joker has landed next to one card—their NAMED card!
Method:
This LOOKS like you have uncanny skill with the cards, but really, it’s a very simple effect that leverages the ‘open index’ principle of memorized deck work.
What is the ‘open index’ principle?
Again, we have Simon Aronson to thank for popularizing this concept.
The idea of a ‘card index’ is a system by which you have certain cards located at certain positions on your person, which you can access at any point in your act.
It’s a powerful technique, but like most things, it only gets better when we bring in the memorized deck.
As Aronson pointed out, a memorized deck is essentially an ‘open index.’
By this, we mean that we have a card index (after all, isn’t the point of the stack that we know the position of each and every card?) but rather than being hidden on our person, it’s out in the ‘open.’
Hence the ‘open index.’
Anytime someone names a card, we can quickly, easily, and covertly locate that card and proceed to perform a stunning effect with it.
Such as this one.
(nice little segue there.)
Ninja Warrior is a fun, fast, and fooling effect that uses a memorized deck and a little elbow grease to make you look far more skilled than you really are.
Here’s how it works:
NOTE: if any of this is hard to understand, refer to my Live session for this module for a visual demo.
The deck is stacked. You have a face-up Joker on the table and another face-up Joker hid on the face of the deck.
You ask your spectator to name a card. Once he does, you hand him the Joker from the table and ask him to examine it.
As he does, you riffle up the inner left corner of the deck. As you do, you’ll be surprised at just how much you see—more than enough to note the identity of each card as it riffles by.
Note – you’ll want to make sure this motion of riffling the corner of the deck as you move it around is a move that you perform throughout all your performances—even when you don’t need to. This way, it’s just a natural movement for you and doesn’t come as a ‘pattern interrupt’ for your spectators.
Since you’re using a stack, you know roughly where the named card is. Riffle fast and then slow as you approach this area. When you see the index of the card, stop. You will now use this break to transition to a full deck cut.
Take the cards in a right-hand overhand grip and prepare to do a swing cut. Before you do, pull down on the outer left corner of the bottom card (our face-up Joker). As you swing cut, retain the Joker in the left hand.
The end result of this is that the named card is placed directly above the Joker.
Now give it another regular cut, placing the face-up Joker and named card in the center of the deck.
Your work is mostly done.
Next, you pick up the deck in your right hand and retrieve the other Joker with your left. As you dribble the cards to the table, you toss the Joker into the deck.
And don’t worry—as a few practices will show you, the other face-up Joker won’t show in the dribble as long as you aren’t crazily slow. (dribbling ‘low’ to the table will help to—the cards will fall but there won’t be any great big honking gaps between cards, which makes it even more invisible. Alternatively, you could cut so the face up Joker is above half way, and make sure you throw your Joker below halfway. Then when you spread later, spread the cards so the already face up Joker looks closer to the real position you threw the other face up Joker in—see the Live Session for how that looks.)
You’ll be left in this situation—one face-up Joker below the selection, one face-up Joker sticking out of the deck somewhere else.
We’re now going to do the only ‘knacky’ part. As we pick up the cards and start to square them, we perform the Tamariz Perpendicular Control on the Joker.
In other words, we push it in angled to the left so that the lower right corner butts against the left little finger. The left thumb contacts the inner top left corner and the thumb lowers as the little finger straightens out.
The result is that the card is turned perpendicular to the rest of the spread, but hidden by your hand.
(again, if any of this feels like ‘too much’ check out the Live session where I show you exactly what this looks like.)
You make sure the perpendicular card is outjogged as far as it can go, and then spread the deck.
Since the real Joker you threw in will now be hidden beneath the spread, the only visible Joker will be the one you previously placed next to the named card.
All that’s left is for you to reveal that you’ve found the selection in whatever way suits you best!
(and, while they react, we gather up the spread, undoing the perpendicular card as we do so. You’ll be left with one Joker face up in the deck, which we can undo between routines—or just switch in another deck.)
Alright, even that much sleight of hand is making me break out in a sweat. Let’s move to my favorite category, ‘Musical’…