Firstly, this is more of a gambling sleight of hand question, but there doesn't seem to be such a section of this forum.
Recently, I have been practicing the top stock control from Expert Card Technique, when I started to wonder what the point of it was. Surely you can just execute a normal riffle shuffle, and retain your top stock by just riffling it on top. So what advantages do more elaborate techniques have?
The first thing I thought have was perhaps the simple riffle shuffle while retaining top stock was not that convincing. Most laymen may not notice that the top cards do not change, but perhaps those who play cards and are familiar with shuffling will? This seems to me unlikely as it is difficult to keep track of whether the top packet is cut to the left or right, and so whether it is kept on top or not. It seems to me that even for magicians the way riffle shuffles are performed vary and so it is hard to keep track of exactly what is going on.
The only definite advantage of using ECT's top stock control is for nullifying a cut - a riffle shuffle and then a cut can be executed while retaining top stock. But this seems quite a trivial detail, significant to magicians perhaps, but not to observers.
So what is the point of the top stock control?
Recently, I have been practicing the top stock control from Expert Card Technique, when I started to wonder what the point of it was. Surely you can just execute a normal riffle shuffle, and retain your top stock by just riffling it on top. So what advantages do more elaborate techniques have?
The first thing I thought have was perhaps the simple riffle shuffle while retaining top stock was not that convincing. Most laymen may not notice that the top cards do not change, but perhaps those who play cards and are familiar with shuffling will? This seems to me unlikely as it is difficult to keep track of whether the top packet is cut to the left or right, and so whether it is kept on top or not. It seems to me that even for magicians the way riffle shuffles are performed vary and so it is hard to keep track of exactly what is going on.
The only definite advantage of using ECT's top stock control is for nullifying a cut - a riffle shuffle and then a cut can be executed while retaining top stock. But this seems quite a trivial detail, significant to magicians perhaps, but not to observers.
So what is the point of the top stock control?