theory11 — Magic Tricks & the World's Finest Playing Cards
Getting a borrowed deck into stack
- Thread starter TheMadgician
- Start date
Chinese Shuffle.
What stack do you need? For Si Stebbins see Chinese Shuffle to Si Stebbins stack in The Secrets of Brother John Hamman and also reproduced in Patrick Redford's Temporarily Out of Order. Redford also includes a couple ways to do this in the course of a trick. Mnemonica doesn't really follow a patter like Si Stebbins so the Chinese Shuffle is harder to use there. I cull Mnemonica, but it needs to be worked into a longer routine though it's a fun project and a good way to practice my culling.
I'd suggest getting the Redford book. He also has material on the Redford stack, which is his variation on Si Stebbins.
What stack do you need? For Si Stebbins see Chinese Shuffle to Si Stebbins stack in The Secrets of Brother John Hamman and also reproduced in Patrick Redford's Temporarily Out of Order. Redford also includes a couple ways to do this in the course of a trick. Mnemonica doesn't really follow a patter like Si Stebbins so the Chinese Shuffle is harder to use there. I cull Mnemonica, but it needs to be worked into a longer routine though it's a fun project and a good way to practice my culling.
I'd suggest getting the Redford book. He also has material on the Redford stack, which is his variation on Si Stebbins.
The stack I'm trying to get the deck into is mnemonica. Culling sounds like a good option. Do you know any good resources on culling?
I use David's Cull by David González, you can get it from Vanishing Inc. People also like Road Runner, I have not learned that one. I'm not sure if Road Runner works as well for culling half the deck at a time, but I imagine it would be fine. You should learn one of these techniques for general use anyway.
When I say I cull it, I mean I use culling to do the Chinese Shuffle. You should learn how the Chinese Shuffle works before you get too far here. It's really not a good method for Mnemonica, I just enjoy the challenge. It must be done purely numerically and the sources given do not explain how to do that. It's just a medium difficulty math puzzle to figure out the process, but putting it into practice is a lot of work. It helps if you really, really like working with numbers. It takes me a little over 2 1/2 minutes to do the 6 culls, though I can improve on that with practice. This is why it must be worked into a longer routine where you just do 1 or maybe 2 during or between each non-stack trick.
I'm not familiar with the Bannon trick Reality One references, but his suggestions are always worth exploring.
Redford also give his version of a method from Hugard's Encyclopedia of Card Tricks you could look at, but personally I don't see the point of naming cards one at a time, putting them in a pile and then pretending you have no idea what order they are in.
Ultimately I suggest you don't try to put a borrowed deck into stack during performance unless you are doing a long performance. You don't want to take up too much of your performance time with the process. If you want to use the Chinese Shuffle with or without culling I suggest you use Si Stebbins or one of its variations, this is much more practical. While you can make it work for Mnemonica it's really more trouble than it's worth. I just really like math, cards and the challenge of making it work. Si Stebbins should be easier to learn than Mnemonica was and has it's own applications.
Again, Temporarily Out of Order by Patrick Redford has the most information on this topic that I have found.
Thank you David for this gold mine of information. I really appreciate it!
I suppose if you really had to put a borrowed deck into Mnemonica you could say you need to make sure all the cards are there and then openly put it in new deck order. Then use the standard methods to get to Mnemonica, but this still seems cumbersome.
My bad... or double bad...
First, "Either Or" is a John Guastaferro effect, not John Bannon. It is from John's book One Degree.
Second, "Either Or" can only get into a partial (maybe 4 to 6 cards) stack.
I'm wondering why you would want to get into a stack using a borrowed deck? I honestly have never performed with a deck borrowed from lay spectators simply because they don't carry decks around with them. Also, most laymen don't see a borrowed deck as being anything different than a shuffled deck that they can see isn't gimmicked. You are creating obstacle that are unnecessary for a good performance.
On way is to have the spectator provide an unopened new deck. From there, it is easy(er) to get into Mnemonica. Another alternative is to do a deck switch. This requires you to know what deck someone has ahead of time and to have a matching deck to do the switch.
First, "Either Or" is a John Guastaferro effect, not John Bannon. It is from John's book One Degree.
Second, "Either Or" can only get into a partial (maybe 4 to 6 cards) stack.
I'm wondering why you would want to get into a stack using a borrowed deck? I honestly have never performed with a deck borrowed from lay spectators simply because they don't carry decks around with them. Also, most laymen don't see a borrowed deck as being anything different than a shuffled deck that they can see isn't gimmicked. You are creating obstacle that are unnecessary for a good performance.
On way is to have the spectator provide an unopened new deck. From there, it is easy(er) to get into Mnemonica. Another alternative is to do a deck switch. This requires you to know what deck someone has ahead of time and to have a matching deck to do the switch.
Thanks for clearing that up! I was wondering why I couldn't find it! 😆
I haven't thought about it that way. Thank you for the useful insight!