Module 3- Part 9: 100 Years in The Making
Benji
100 years in the making…
We’ve discussed many methods to make it FEEL as though the audience has shuffled the deck.
But what if, even after all of that, you can’t shake the urge that you NEED your audience to y’know, actually shuffle the cards?
Like…the entire deck. In their own hands. For REAL.
Turns out—you can.
We owe this groundbreaking idea to Charles T. Jordan. He first published this concept back in around 1920, but despite this fact being known for 100 years now…it’s STILL one of the most fooling things you can do with a memorized deck.
Here’s the idea:
After a spectator riffle shuffles a deck of cards once, the cards really aren’t all that mixed.
All you’ve actually done is taken half of the stack and shuffled it into the other half.
Those two halves have been shuffled together, but the individual halves still maintain their order.
NOTE: For this to work, they need to riffle shuffle the cards. To make sure this happens, gesture or demonstrate what to do before you give them the cards.
Perhaps the easiest way to explain this is with an example.
Let’s say you have a deck of 10 cards, numbered 1 to 10.
You take 5 into each hand and riffle shuffle them together.
The end result, from top down, looks like this:
1,
6,
2,
7,
3,
4,
8,
9,
10.
The two halves are shuffled together, but each individual half (1-5 and 6-10) maintains its original order.
Look:
1,
6,
2,
7,
3,
4,
8,
9,
5,
10
If you look at the left hand column and right hand column, we still have cards 1-5 retaining their order, and on the right we have cards 6-10.
All that’s happened is that those two orders have been combined:
1,
6,
2,
7,
3,
4,
8,
9,
5,
10
Now imagine what might happen if we asked someone to remove a card. Let’s say they removed the 7. If we get them to place it back in a different place, look what happens:
1,
6,
2,
3,
4,
8,
7,
9,
5,
10.
Which is the same thing as:
1,
6,
2,
3,
4,
8,
7,
9,
5,
10.
Notice how there’s one card out of place that would be immediately obvious, even if we didn’t know the identity beforehand?
The 7.
When you use a memorized deck, it’s the exact same thing at play.
Sure, the scale is higher since you’re using 52 cards, but it’s exactly the same. After all, a memorized deck is just a deck in which each card is also represented by a number, from 1 to 52. You’re shuffling cards 1-26 into cards 27-52, which will produce two easily followed chains.
NOTE: They don’t even need to shuffle evenly, half and half. They could just shuffle cards 1-19 into 20-52, and we’d get the same end result: two chains of cards that follow their respective orders.
Here’s a cool effect using this principle to get your gears whirring:
We can play a nice little ‘lie detector’ routine using this idea.
Get your spectator to riffle shuffle the cards.
We’ll follow along using our 1-10 cards.
Let’s say they shuffle as follows:
1,
7,
2,
3,
4,
8,
5,
6,
9,
10.
Or, that is to say:
1,
7,
2,
3,
4,
8,
5,
6,
9,
10,
We can now ask the spectator to turn the deck face up and to start calling out cards. At any point they like, they can lie. The minute they do, we’ll know.
Now, for this to work, we need to see the first few cards—so we know the ‘starting point’ of the two chains.
We can do this as we demonstrate:
“For example, you could say…”
We take the cards and call out the first few cards, apparently demonstrating what they are to do. In reality, we’re waiting until we see the starting cards of the two chains.
In our case, we’d call out 10, then 9, then 6.
At this point, we know our two chains. One starts at 10, the other starts at 6.
We have to know where the two chains start so we don’t accidentally think they’re lying when they transition from the first chain to the second. Now we know.
We don’t know at which point each card will come, but we DO know that one of the chains will go from 10 down to 7, in order, and the other will go from 6 to 1, in order.
So as they call out the cards, we track their progress through the two chains.
For example, if they called out:
“10.”
Yep.
“9.”
Yep. That’s what we’re expecting to come after the first card of the first chain—10.
“6.”
Yep. We already glimpsed that one. This is the start of our second chain.
“5.”
Yep. That must be right, since it comes after the first card of our second chain—6.
“8.”
Yep again. That is the card we were expecting to follow the previously called 9 sooner or later.
“4.”
Yep. This follows from 5.
“2.”
Hold up. 2 doesn’t come after 4. We’re expecting 3 before we get to that. And 2 certainly doesn’t follow naturally from 8.
Therefore, they must be lying.
They are?
Great. Got them.
NOTE – to see exactly how this works when done with a full deck, refer to the Live Session for this module.
And if any of the above was confusing, check out the Live Session for a visual demonstration with actual cards.
NOTE: As they call out the cards, you could ask them to hand you each card after you’ve guessed if they’re lying or not. Now place all the cards from one chain in one face-down pile, and the cards from the other chain in another face-down pile. Place the higher cards pile on top of the lower cards pile once you finish, and you’ve reassembled the stack.
You can do a similar thing while searching for a chosen card. Remove all the cards you’re ‘unsure’ about (in reality, these are just all the cards of one chain) as you search for the card. After revealing, add the pile back onto the deck (top or bottom depending on which chain you removed) to reassemble the stack.
Finale Note:
If someone asks you at any point “can I shuffle the deck?” I would move straight into this procedure, disregarding whatever I had planned without a moment’s hesitation.
That’s because, the second you hesitate before making your mind up—the damage is done.
The fact you even have to think about it says it all. Suddenly, the order of the cards matters.
So instead, if someone asks me, I just hand them the deck and tell them to give them a riffle shuffle, then move into this routine. Once I’ve finished this routine, I’m back in stack and can jump back into whatever I was about to do previously.
Whew.
That was an interesting one.
Next module we’ll briefly discuss a far more simple solution than any of that.
Let’s take a look…