Mem-deck controls

Oct 1, 2009
17
0
Florida
Hey everyone!

First time posting, as I've just recently returned to card magic after several years. I picked right back up full force by buying Juan Tamariz' Mnemonica, and diving into the immeasurably deep world of memorized deck magic.

I'm pretty comfortable with the structure now, and have mastered many of the basic sleights, color changes, false cuts & shuffles that your average amateur can do, but I'm struggling with a seemingly difficult concept. Many of the references in Tamariz' book say things like "to prepare for this trick, move the AS under the 3H, then cut the KD to the bottom". I know where all of those cards are in the stack by heart, and can tell you their stack numbers and the cards above and below them. I can even slip cut or spread cull them to different locations without looking at their faces (assuming I can count to them), but I'm struggling a bit with how to count to them most efficiently. Just knowing that AS is stack number 7, and 3H is stack number 28 is not helping me physically find them in the stack and shift them around without arousing suspicion. Visual counting and thumb riffles seem too obvious to spectators for me right now, but I may just need more practice.

The best solution I've come up with so far is to use Hofsinzer's Spread Cull (actually the modern Roadrunner version) with the deck face down, but even that seems too slow when performing effects like Any Card at Any Number (not the Berglas version).

Does anyone have any ingenious suggestions as to where I might look for some answers for rapid counting to a certain position in the deck? I don't mind practicing long hours, I just want to practice the most efficient way of doing something, and the Spread Cull seems kind of clunky to me.

Thanks in advance,
Mnemonimage
 
Oct 1, 2009
17
0
Florida
Thanks for the reply. Could you be a bit more specific in your method suggestion? I've read about estimation in Card College, not to mention in Tamariz' book, but it seems somewhat slow to me. I may just need to find a better description of the way to go about it, but my attempts go something like this:

-Looking for JH (#20 in the stack), cut to # 17
-Glimpse and see I'm off by 3 cards
-Riffle 3 cards with right thumb in Biddle grip and get thumb break
-Transfer to pinky break
-Move on with trick

That seems like a heck of a lot of shifting around for not having accomplished anything yet...

Any suggestions?
 
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