Module 5- Part 5: The Wet Paper Towel Dilemma
Benji
The Wet Paper Towel Dilemma
Here’s an interesting dilemma…
How do we make ourselves appear to have ‘banned-from-Vegas-for-life’ level sleight of hand skill…when really, a wet paper towel could do more damage at the card table than us?
While we’ve covered a few ideas and routines previous to this, now is the moment to get really deep into what the memorized deck can offer us in regard to the enigmatic and elusive ‘poker deal’ category of effects.
First of all, as I’m sure you’re well aware by now—this effect is perhaps the archetype of the ‘technical view.’
It’s hard to find a MORE ‘technical’ effect than dealing a Royal Flush in Spades from a shuffled deck!
(all while claiming to be controlling, locating, second, bottom, and perhaps even center dealing them)
And while, sure, there are undoubtedly things out there in the world of gambling that are HARDER, I’m not sure there’s anything else quite so iconic and instantly recognizable as the ultimate demonstration of skill with playing cards.
Yet, with a memorized deck, it’s easy.
That’s because the very best memorized stacks were meticulously set up to allow you to easily and quickly deal incredible poker hands with very minimal changes to the stack (and often, none whatsoever!)
With a memorized deck, dealing a Royal Flush in Spades is just the start of what’s possible.
All of which means we can start with a less impressive poker deal and gradually work our way up to the knockout finish, without breaking a sweat.
(note: when I first wrote the above sentence, no joke, I wrote “all without breaking a stack.” Maybe I should take a break from this for a minute…)
And the best news is, once you know the stack—most of your work is already done.
But it’s all well and good me TELLING you that.
I wanted to figure out a way to demonstrate exactly what’s going on when we’re using the memorized deck for these poker effects.
Because, when you first start doing this stuff, it FEELS like magic.
How do the cards manage it? It all looks so random!
And when you stare at the stacks, they DO look random. That’s the beauty of it.
But they’re not.
However, I can keep saying that all I like, but I’ll wager it’s hard to believe until you see exactly what’s going on ‘beneath the hood.’
To do so, I prepared an interesting ‘thought experiment.’
(alright, it’s not really, but I’ve always wanted to say that.)
If you watch the Live Session, you’ll see me deal a poker hand from a deck of cards in a manner that suggests I must be either:
- A modern-day Charlie Miller
- Cheating
Well, we all know the first one isn’t true.
Which leaves us with the second option.
Bingo.
But perhaps that doesn’t surprise you.
After all, I told you from the outset that we’re going to be dealing these poker hands using stacks. How is that a surprise?
Well, it’s not.
But here’s what might be:
I’m not using any of the ‘regular’ stacks. In fact, I’m using this (VERY) convenient arrangement…
Now, if you’re anything like Jacob, your first reaction might be a mix of ‘oh, you got me!’ and ‘but isn’t that kinda lame?’
Is it though?
This is a stack.
THIS is what we’re working with when we’re using any of our memorized decks.
We do a slightly better job of disguising it, but it’s the same thing.
How?
Well, the cards are arranged so that if we deal a certain number of hands, certain cards will fall to the dealer.
That’s it.
In this case, we can deal a Royal Flush in any of the suits when we deal 4 hands. A cursory examination of the stack will show you why that’s so easy.
Well, the same thing is possible with the memorized deck (I’ll show you a specific example of that later.)
We can also deal a Four of a Kind for values 9 through 2 (look at the even spacing between the values).
In a memorized deck, we can deal Four of a Kinds too (and I’ll show you one such example later.)
In this case, the cards are also arranged in our CHSD order. As a result, if we so desired (“and as it happens, we do” as Guy Hollingworth might say) we could deal a complete suit to any hand.
If we wanted to deal the Hearts to the third player, we would just need to move one card from the bottom to the top.
But that’s not out of reach with a memorized deck either.
In fact, in the opening chapters of Mnemonica, Juan shows you how to deal all the cards of a particular suit to yourself.
(and I give one example of this in the Live Session.)
However, all those benefits aside, I’m still purposefully overlooking ONE thing:
That stack is blummin’ obvious from a mile away!
Ah. And, as Shakespeare might say, ‘therein lies the rub.’
We really don’t want to be using this as our go-to stack.
But that’s okay. Because we won’t be.
But I don’t think we’re quite ready to dive into the deep end, so before we do, let’s push the boat out just a little further with THIS stack:
At a glance, there’s a lot less ‘built-in’ order with this one, however, we can still access many of the same deals.
That’s because of this key reason:
The cards in the hand we want to deal don’t need to fall in ORDER.
Which is to say:
As long as, at the end of the deal, you have the 10 through Ace of Spades in your hand, you’re good. It doesn’t matter whether the order is Ten, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace or if it’s Queen, Ace, Jack, King, and Ten.
(in fact, it’s MORE believable if the arrangement isn’t perfect. Dealing someone the 10S, JS, QS, KS, and AS in perfect order stinks of some kind of trick. Whereas if you can deal them the JS, AS, QS, 10S, and KS—that’s way more believable and makes it feel like you really DID locate and control the cards from a shuffled deck. The other benefit is that—speaking as a decided non-cardshark—I’d assume this is how it would work in an actual hustle. In a hustle, they don’t care about the aesthetics—they care about the raw results.)
This makes a huge difference.
It means we can arrange the deck so that each Royal Flush is still accessible, but without needing to have a block of four Tens followed by a block of four Queens, and so on.
To see the benefit of this, look again at the first stack.
Now compare it to the second stack.
Which one looks more orderly?
You might say it doesn’t matter—because BOTH of them clearly have an order once you look long enough.
But that’s not the point.
The point is that, with the second stack we can achieve VERY similar results, but without the arrangement being stinking obvious from the moment we spread the cards.
Of course, the second stack is far from inconspicuous, but take a look at how it might look when we spread it:
And yet despite the vast difference:
Like the first stack, we can access any Royal Flush.
We can also deal any complete suit, since the order still follows CHSD.
We can still deal a Four of a Kind (see the nines).
We can deal a Full House. We can deal a Three of a Kind. And I’m sure there are many more deals built-in.
The main takeaway is:
When we stop worrying about the ‘aesthetic’ order of the deal, we can make our stack look a lot more random than it is.
And if you can understand that, you’ll understand how memorized decks are able to deal incredible poker hands out of a seemingly random arrangement.
(but the magicians that built them are REALLLY good at hiding these arrangements in the stacks.)
In fact, just to illustrate one final point, here’s one last stack I threw together:
This is an example of another property of poker hands built into our memorized deck.
That property is this: we can embed the deals ‘in’ the deck, so a single cut will bring that deal to the top. And since they’re embedded in the deck, they’re much harder to spot.
See how much more random that arrangement looks? It’s very difficult to spot ANY kind of pattern at a glance (or a couple of glances), yet we have:
Each Royal Flush is maintained (we just need to cut the first card of the flush to the top of the deck.)
We can deal any complete suit. We can deal a Four of a Kind.
This is another step closer to the memorized deck. In the memorized deck, not every deal is going to be conveniently located at the top of the deck. We’ll need to cut it into position.
But thanks to our earlier efforts on estimation cuts, that should be the easy part.
Now that we’re on the same page in terms of how these poker deals work, let’s play a game that should show you how to find all the Poker Deals your eager eyes could ever want.
I like to call this game ‘dealsearch.’
It’s basically Wordsearch, but searching for poker hands rather than words.
To play, download pictures of the stack arrangements, formatted like the one below.
For this instance of the game, we’ll use the Aronson stack.
Ideally, you’d print this off so you can circle cards and annotate them, but this will do just fine for now.
Here’s how the game works:
Start on the first card. Think about all the potential poker hands you could deal with that card. Then count another 4 cards and look at the 4th card.
See if the card you landed on could be of use in one of the deals you defined.
(alright, maybe not ALL. But exhaust the most common ones.)
Alternatively, we can start by listing the cards we need for a particular deal. Then we circle those cards in the stack and look at the relationship between them—is the difference between each card the same? If so, we can incorporate it into a poker deal.
Don’t limit yourself by treating the JS as the only possible top card. Remember, you can cut any card to the top and deal from there. In some stacks, hands will become possible if you are willing to slip one card to a different location, or are willing to second deal on certain cards. Either way, the work you need to put in is generally pretty minimal.
(if the idea of second dealing scares you, don’t worry. I just put that in for the hardcore guys. It scares me too.)
However, Aronson is a great way to start with because so many of the deals are built straight into the stack with no need to rearrange stuff.
This probably sounds harder than it really is, so let me get you started with a concrete example, and then some heavy hints.
Example 1. Royal Flush in Spades
We’re going to use the second approach—start with the hand we want and work backward.
We start by finding one of the cards in the hand. The JS is pretty convenient right at the top of the deck.
Now let’s explore the distances between the JS and the other cards in this poker hand.
If we count 5 cards more, we land on the AS.
So ‘5’ is our key number hear—that’s how many hands it looks like we’ll need if this is to work.
Let’s count 5 cards past the AS.
…the 10S.
Huh. Well, all looks pretty good so far!
Let’s count another 5.
…he 8C??
What’s that all about?
Well, no need to give up just yet.
Remember how we discussed that certain poker arrangements are ‘embedded’ in the stack? I.e they don’t NEED to start at the top of the deck.
Let’s try working backward from the JS and see what we stumble upon.
…the QS!
Nearly there. Let’s count back another 5.
…the KS!
There we go! We just need to cut the KS to the top of the deck and we’ll be able to deal a complete Royal Flush in Spades.
(of course, if we’re being technical and dealing to the dealer last, we’ll need to cut so the KS is the 5th card down. This means we need to cut the 6H to the top.)
While we’re on the topic, can you spot any other Royal Flushes?
(try Hearts)
Example 2. Four of a Kind.
In this case, we need to find 4 cards of the same value, that are evenly spaced in the arrangement. For this one, I’d encourage just taking a ‘zoomed out’ look at the deck. See if you see any values that look promising.
If you don’t want the hint, stop reading and come back once you’ve found it.
Here’s the hint:
You might have more luck on this one if you start your search from the BOTTOM, rather than the top.
Example 3. Three of a Kind.
Your hard work on the previous example will probably pay off here, because you may have found a promising run of cards…only to be frustrated that the last card didn’t match the others.
Well, although you may have missed this at the time—while you were looking for the Four of a Kind, you actually went and found yourself a nifty little Three of a Kind you can deal if requested.
If you didn’t, now’s your chance to look before the next hint shows up like a bad smell…
HINT: take the value we discovered in example 2 and – 3.
😉
NOTE: If you’re willing to deal to less players, there’s another Three of a Kind in Tens.
Example 4. Full House
Just a reminder for the non-poker players (which, ironically, includes yours truly.)
A Full House consists of a hand of 5 cards, in which you have a Three of a Kind and a Two of a Kind.
For this one, pair your existing knowledge of Three of a Kinds you discovered with a new target—a 2 of a Kind.
HINT: 8s over 2s.
Ok, that hint was pretty blatant, but I’ll leave it to you to find where to start dealing.
Example 5. The Four Aces
You’ll have one indifferent card within this, but you’ll nonetheless have dealt all four Aces.
I suppose that this technically belongs with the ‘Four of a Kind’, but it feels like its own category—it’s so iconic.
Hint: the AS is a good place to start.
Example 6. Flush
Here’s a chance to talk about another cool aspect of these deals.
That’s this—when you deal the hands, it doesn’t need to be JUST the cards in that hand. As we’ve seen, sometimes we have a leftover card. And sometimes, that leftover card is smack bang in the middle of the sequence.
The QS is the leftover card for this flush sequence.
See if you can work backward from that.
Example 7. Combined deal.
As we’ve been going through these deals, you might have noticed something interesting about the ‘location’ of them.
In fact, here’s your hint: if you cut a certain card to the top, it’s possible to deal 4 of the above hands to 4 people at the same time!
Crazy, right?
By the way, none of this is me ‘revealing’ anything. It’s right there in the stack for you to see!
And there are more combinations for you to find.
A couple of considerations:
Again, the hands don’t need to fall perfectly. You might deal a Four of a Kind by dealing two 3s, then a 5, then another two 3s. We just care about getting the hand by the end of the deal.
Of course, this is just a brief exploration of the poker deals. But hopefully it’s demonstrated that, even when the deck looks random, there can be a ‘hol bunch of patterns and deals built into it.
You can play this ‘pokersearch’ game with the other stacks out there. As you do, don’t be afraid to move a card here or a card there if it allows a deal to open up—these kinds of changes are pretty minimal and can be pulled off in performance.
(if you’d rather skip straight to the answers, see Mnemonica, In Order to Amaze, and Bound to Please.)
But to be honest, with just the stuff we’ve been through, you’ve got a LOT of options.
And because of the way the cards are arranged, it’s invisible to the untrained eye. Really, that’s the ‘final form’ of this evolution. We started with some neat deals, but a pretty obvious stack. Then we got a little cleverer, but it was still obvious. Now we’re here, at the memorized deck.
What a ride!
NOTE: How do we get back in stack after a poker deal?
Remember the formula we gave in a previous section?
If you deal M hands of N cards, pick them up from right to left, deal N hands of M cards to undo the deal, pick those up from left to right, and you’ve reset the stack.
NOTE: A natural question at this point might be “which stack is the best for poker deals?”
If you’re looking for ‘range’, use Tamariz. However, in many cases you’ll need to move certain cards around for certain deals or carry out second deals.
That’s if you want to give them precise options for the deals.
Personally, I would use Aronson because there’s no moving cards, and the deals are clean and direct. Plus, if you dig a little deeper into Bound to Please, Aronson uses Rusduck’s ‘Zensational’ stack within his own stack, which opens up a lot of other possibilities.
So if you don’t want to have to do moves under pressure during this routine, I’d use Aronson.
And if you use both stacks and want to get REALLY precise on the hands dealt (giving your audience the chance to choose the exact cards in the deal) Pit Hartling’s Poker Formulas are an incredible resource. If you have Pit’s book, here’s the link to his formulas:
https://www.denisbehr.de/pokerformulas/
Woody Aragon Memorandum has some good stuff too, as does Rusduck’s ‘The Cardiste’.
NOTE: what’s incredible is that this stuff is just a ‘freebie’ you get when you memorize the deck. For me personally, I memorized a deck to do the OTHER effects—the stuff that makes up the rest of this course. Yet, in doing so, I’d unlocked the equivalent of a ‘free bonus’ that allowed me to deal practically any poker hand called for with very little work. Not bad, as bonuses go!
Alright, I didn’t think this section was going to turn out this big, but I’m glad we got it covered.
Let’s move back into my ‘comfort zone’ with one of the two NEW concepts I’m going to share with you today…