Module 3- Part 7: “Remember…you shuffled the cards!”
Benji
“Remember…you shuffled the cards!”
This ‘ere tactic is one of the most diabolically devious deceptions in all of magic…
Remember the sage advice Eric Mead gave us—the number one danger when working with a memorized deck is that the cards can’t be mixed. But we want to give the spectators the feeling that they CAN.
Enter this section’s topic…
It’s a way to make the spectator feel like they shuffled the cards—when in fact, they didn’t.
Actually, they did.
But not in the way they think.
Here’s what it looks like:
You shuffle the cards together and spread them on the table in front of the spectator.
“Can you help me? Push them together. Yes, like that. Awesome.”
Next…
“Now can you give the cards a cut?”
And then later on in the routine, just before the big reveal, you turn back to the spectator and say:
“Remember—YOU shuffled the cards. You cut the cards. You did everything! And yet…”
…cue the reveal.
Cue the applause.
Cue the amazement.
Now, some of you may have read the above description and wondered:
But Benji, the spectator DOES shuffle the cards!
Not so fast. If you read it closely, you’ll see that the spectator actually ‘pushes’ the cards together. They don’t ‘shuffle.’
There’s a huge difference between ‘push’ and ‘shuffle.’
However, fortunately for us, this difference isn’t very obvious in the mind of the audience—which allows us to later create false memories by saying things like
In this scenario, WE are the ones that actually weave the cards together in the shuffle motion. They just help us push them together.
NOTE: If you go back to Module 2 and look at the ‘Coincedental’ case study, you’ll notice that Juan does this EXACT thing. Notice how JUAN is the one that ‘shuffles’ the cards together. Yet, because he lets the spectator PUSH the cards together (which really, does nothing to their order) he can later say ‘you shuffled the cards!’
Your question might now be:
Okay…I get that. But what does that solve. Does it matter whether it’s us doing the initial shuffling or the audience? Either way, the cards are being shuffled!
Well, yes.
But also…no.
See, there’s a certain type of shuffle (that is less of a shuffle and more of an entire genre of magic) that I’m so excited to introduce you to…
The ‘faro’ shuffle.
No pyramids here, that’s ‘faro’ with an ‘f’.
The faro shuffle is simply a fancy way of saying a shuffle where all the cards perfectly interweave.
Imagine shuffling the cards…but perfectly.
There are two types of faros (at least, two types that we’re concerned with right now.)
Out Faros and In Faros.
An Out Faro is where the bottom card and top card stay constant throughout the shuffling. When you shuffle, the bottom card of the bottom packet stays at the bottom, and the top card of the top packet stays on top.
An In Faro is when the top card of the lower packet becomes the new top card, and the bottom card of the upper packet becomes the new bottom card.
Here’s a good way of thinking about it.
Open your hands and place your left hand on top of your right hand. Your hands should be parallel to your body (with the tips of the left fingers facing the right, and the tips of your right fingers facing the left.)
Your left hand represents the upper portion of the deck, and your right hand represents the lower portion of the deck.
Now separate your hands and interlace your fingers.
Which finger is on top now?
If your left first finger is the top finger, you’ve performed an Out Faro (the left first finger was on top before, and it still is after weaving.)
The bottom finger should be your right little finger—again, the same as before.
However, if you’ve performed
It’s the same with a deck of cards.
Only, replace 10 fingers with 52 playing cards. In an Out Faro, the top portion of the deck gets shuffled into the bottom portion so that the card originally on top stays there, and the card originally on the bottom does the same. However, in an In Faro, the new top card is the top card of the bottom portion, and the new bottom card is the bottom card of the top portion.
Ok. Now you understand what a faro is.
But why should you care?
Here’s one of the many beautiful facts about the faro shuffle that I’ve been building up to:
If you give a deck of cards 8 ‘Out Faros’, the deck will return to its original order.
Seriously.
If you shuffle the deck perfectly 8 times in a row, you’ll be left in the exact same state you started in.
This fact becomes VERY useful when we’re working with a memorized deck.
Why?
We can give the deck 6 out faros prior to performance, so that once we ARE performing…we only need to give the deck 2 out faros to bring ourselves back to our memorized deck starting order.
To the audience, we’ve just shuffled the deck two times—yet we’ve actually maintained complete order.
(many experienced mem deck performers have recommended this…from Simon Aronson to Michael Close.)
But it gets better.
We can faro the cards, and then spread them on the table for our spectators to push them together. Since we farod the cards, the outcome is already determined. All the spectator is doing is ‘locking in’ our shuffle. They themselves are not shuffling the cards.
For example:
Go back and watch that Juan Tamariz video again. Notice how after he does the shuffling motion, he just gets the spectator to push them together.
And then later in the routine, he says:
“You shuffled the cards!”
Well, no…he didn’t.
But we’ve made it FEEL as though they did.
We’ve essentially implanted ‘false memories’ in the audience’s mind. Pretty powerful stuff, huh?
In my opinion, this is a great way to open your performance. Straight out the gate, if your audience feels satisfied that they ‘could’ shuffle the cards at any moment, we’ve put up a wall over the real solution and left them to seek out other solutions…which they of course won’t find.
(cheeky Magic Way reference for the scholars… 😉 )
NOTE: again, going back to Juan—he’s a master at making his faros ‘look’ messy (see Sonata book), but he most definitely is aware of and leverages this fact.
Now, don’t worry if the idea of shuffling the cards ‘perfectly’ every time sounds impossible. In the next module, we’re going to show you our ‘easy’ faro (that looks just as good, in my opinion) that anyone can do…even the spectators themselves!
So don’t worry if faros still seem deeply mysterious to you.
We’ve got plenty more exciting faro stuff coming soon.
For now, I just wanted to let you know what they were, and a basic application—how you can use them to make it feel like the cards are not only shuffled…but shuffled BY the audience!
Let’s move into the next section—the ‘great and powerful’ half stack…