Last week, I showed you a whole herd of methods for blowing someone’s mind with a 32 card packet.
However, one or two of those methods weren’t particularly easy…
In this week’s Inner Circle content, I’ll show you a simple fix for this that I picked up from Asi Wind.
Really, what this comes down to is a combination of two factors…
- The faro cycle
- A technique Asi Wind uses for when things don’t ‘go your way’
Let’s start with the first one.
Here’s what I said about it last week. In this case, I was talking about a 32 card packet, but as I’ll show you in a minute, it’s just as relevant for a 16 card packet:
If you haven’t guessed already, these shuffles are going to be a very special type of shuffle—the faro shuffle. Once they give us a number, we’re going to know which ‘faro’ we’ll end up in (based on the charts I put together.)
This means they really can pick any number. That’s the beauty of the faro cycle—it’s a CYCLE.
So if they say ‘7 shuffles’, we simply ‘cycle’ through the faro cycle in our head.
We know that FIVE faro shuffles bring the cards back to their original order.
So really, 7 faros brings us to the second faro. 5 brings us back to the original order, and 7-5 = 2.
If we were shuffling, it’d go like this:
First shuffle – faro 1.
Second shuffle – faro 2.
Third shuffle – faro 3.
Fourth shuffle – faro 4.
Fifth shuffle – original state
Sixth shuffle – faro 1
Seventh shuffle – faro 2.
See?
Now, we’re simply going to remember that we’ll end up in faro 2, and proceed to do the shuffles.
The point of me bringing this up again is to remind you of how the faro cycle works.
Now that we had that fixed in our heads, let’s look at the second factor…
Asi Wind’s ingenious technique for when things don’t ‘go your way’.
It all comes down to how you phrase what you say.
If you just straight up say “how many shuffles would you like?”, you’ve boxed yourself into a corner.
However, if you say instead, “pick a number between 1 and 10”, you leave a lot more options open.
Let’s say they pick a number that lands you in faro 2 or 3.
Now we can turn to another audience member and say:
“And for you, what number would you like?”
There’s a good chance that when you add their number onto the faro cycle, you’ll land on either faro 1, 4 or 5.
If not, no worries. By now the number is probably getting on the bigger side, so we don’t want to add another number to it.
So we might say:
“And to further randomise this beyond any possibility of me knowing where we would end up, sir, could you choose a number to SUBTRACT from our total?”
Again, there’s a good chance you’ll end up on faro 1, 4 or 5 once you factor this subtraction into the cycle.
At this point, if things still aren’t working out, you’ll need to ‘jazz’ a little. Every situation will be different. Maybe you’ll ask a fourth spectator. Maybe you’ll decide to do one or two bonus faro shuffles in your hands while speaking (after all, you haven’t told them what the purpose of the number is yet – they don’t know it has any impact on your shuffles, so they won’t pay attention to this.)
Either way, it should be pretty simple to make sure you always end up in either faro 1, 4 or 5—all of which are incredibly easy to operate.
Alright, that’s part 1 of this week’s ideas.
What about part 2?
I promised an effect with the 16 card faro, and here it is…
Effect:
You spread the cards face up and let the spectator look at a single card. They choose how many times you shuffle. After you shuffle, they name their card, and you start dealing through the cards. You display them face up, then deal them face down into a pile.
The game is simple. As soon as they see their card, they have to slap their hand down on top of the pile. If you beat them to it, you win. If they get to the card before you, they win.
As you deal, they see their card and slap their hand on top of it before you. They think they’ve won.
However, when you get them to turn over the card beneath their hand, they see it’s not their card. In fact, their card isn’t even in the deck!
You tell them that, after playing this game so many times, you’ve gotten pretty good. In fact, you’re so fast that they didn’t even see you reach in, grab the card, and place it in your back pocket—all in the time before they slammed their hand down!
It’s an astonishing and impossible looking demonstration of skill, that is actually very easy.
Method:
Some of you may have noticed I just described an effect that sounds very similar to Paul Harris’ ‘Reflex’ (and Pit Hartling’s ‘High Noon’.)
That’s because it adapts the method to 16 cards (in memorized order, with faros applied.)
Let’s pull up the chart I put together last time:
“Original state: 1-16
First Faro: 1, 9, 2, 10, 3, 11, 4, 12, 5, 13, 6, 14, 7, 15, 8, 16
Second faro: 1, 5, 9, 13, 2, 6, 10, 14, 3, 7, 11, 15, 4, 8, 12, 16
Third faro: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16
Fourth faro: 1-16”
Here are the steps to the method:
- Spectator chooses a card
This really is a free choice. Spread the cards face up and let them choose one. Don’t give them too long—we don’t want them examining the stack order longer than necessary.
- They choose how many times we shuffle
You’ll notice that we start with a similar premise to last week’s routine—the spectator chooses how many times we shuffle. Like I explained that time, this is actually not what it seems, thanks to the nature of the faro cycle.
Here’s how it works:
Let’s suppose they say ‘7 shuffles’. In this case, we simply ‘cycle’ through the faro cycle in our head.
We know that FOUR faro shuffles bring the cards back to their original order.
So really, 7 faros brings us to the third faro. 4 brings us back to the original order, and 7-4 = 3.
If we were shuffling, it’d go like this:
First shuffle – faro 1.
Second shuffle – faro 2.
Third shuffle – faro 3.
Fourth shuffle – original state.
Fifth shuffle – faro 1
Sixth shuffle – faro 2
Seventh shuffle – faro 3.
See?
So, we know which faro we’re in.
- They name their card. We deal cards face up, calculating based on which faro we’re in
Faro 1: If we’re in Faro 1, we follow two chains. The first card is 1, the second card is 9. So once we deal 9, we know the next card is 2. Once we deal 2, we know the next card is 10.
Thanks to this, we know when their card is ‘coming up.’
(if their card was the QH, aka 11, we’d know we were about to deal it after we deal ‘3’.)
When their card is second from the top (in the above case, when we’ve dealt 10, we know 11 is the second card down, since we’ll be dealing 3 next, then 11) we double lift to display their card. Then we turn over the double and place the real top card on the pile face down. At this point, they’ll slap their hand on the pile. We can take advantage of the confusion, and their confidence that they’ve won, to palm out the top card (which is now their chosen card) ready to ‘produce’ from our pocket.
Faro 2: If we’re in Faro 2, we add 4 to the stack number each time we deal. Like last time, we ‘reset’ after a couple of cards:
13 -> 2
14 -> 3
15 -> 4
16 -> 1 (although by this point, we’ll have finished dealing.)
We’re adding 5 on these (except 16 -> 1).
13 plus 3 is 16, plus 2 is 2. (3 + 2 = 5.)
14 plus 2 is 16, plus 3 is 3. (2 + 3 = 5.)
15 plus 1 is 16, plus 4 is 4. (1 + 4 = 5.)
Since we’re starting at 1, it’s easier to track these resets—we can keep track of which cards started the chain previously, so we know what’s coming next.
Once we have this pattern established, we use the same method above to reveal the card.
Faro 3: If we’re in Faro 2, we add 2 to the stack number each time we deal. Once we hit 15, we start again at 2.
Once we have this pattern established, we use the same method above to reveal the card.
Faro 4: same method as above for the reveal, and the count is simple—we’re back in our memorized order.
NOTE: If they happen to choose the card that is the new top card, simply shift one card from the bottom to the top. And if their card is the bottom card, simply shift one card from top to bottom.
Neat, huh?
I hope you enjoyed the last few weeks of faro madness!
I’ll be back next week with something totally different and fun next week.
Speak then!
Your friend,
Benji