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Invisibly Subtle

This month’s “Free Trick” is less of a trick and more of an idea. It comes right out of my some-day-to-be-released-big-huge-book-I’m-working-on. Enjoy.

Those of you who’ve read my ebook, Spectral Chill/Tarot Below Zero, will know that I’m not afraid of routines that require multi-tasking and thinking while performing. Some effects require you to really be at the top of your mental game . . . thinking or calculating one thing while saying another all the while not seeming distracted by your inner monologue.

Obviously I have no problem with effects like that, however, if you can get the same impact with less work, why not? So here’s a very simple thing, so simple in fact that I’d be shocked if nobody else has thought of this. I’ve just never seen it before, so I thought I’d share.

The idea is simply a rearrangement of the pairs of cards in an Invisible Deck. If you have an Invisible Deck, you’ll know what I mean. If you don’t have or haven’t heard of an Invisible Deck, stop reading and go out and buy an invisible deck.

For the rest of you, here’s what I recommend. Pair up each club to each diamond and each heart to each spade. So in other words, you have the 7 of Hearts back to back with the 7 of Spades, King of Clubs back to back with the King of Diamonds, etc.

Then place all of your clubs and hearts facing one way and therefore the spades and diamonds facing the other way. Then give the deck a thorough overhand shuffle being sure not to separate the pairs.

One last thing to remember . . . CHaSeD. I’m sure you remember that from back in the day. It’s an old mnemonic used to remember the order Clubs, Hearts, Spades, Diamonds, referred to as “chased” order (i.e. CHaSeD).

If you remember that, then you’ll realize that the C and H (clubs and hearts) are facing the same direction and the S and D (Spades and Diamonds) are facing the other direction.

So you have Hearts and Spades paired back to back – Easy to remember since a spade looks like a black heart. The clubs and diamonds are back to back because they are both the less common suits. You have the club and heart sides of the pairs facing one way and the spade and diamond side of the pairs facing the other way.

Your deck is now in a much simpler set up for revealing the thought of card in the deck. If the person says four of clubs, you’ll bring out the deck with the club and heart (C and H of CHaSeD) facing down. Then you’ll spread through until you see the four of diamonds in the face up portion of the deck. Directly below it you’ll find the face down four of clubs. Thus “proving” it’s the only reversed card in the face up deck. Easy.

For those of you who use the Invisible Deck, you know it can be an excellent weapon. There are tons of things you can do with this deck. I’m merely offering a less-thinking-and-doing-math-in-your-head version of handling the cards. For ideas on what effects you can do, I highly recommend Jay Sankey’s project, Invisible. It covers everything you can imagine about this incredible tool.

9 Responses to "Invisibly Subtle"

Arnon says:

August 2012 at 7:21 am

Some members of your audience WILL notice the absence of two suits in the deck. The calculation involved in the normal set-up is worth it for that reason alone.
1. Jeff Stone says:
  
  August 2012 at 8:39 am
  
  @Arnon – I appreciate your comment. However, I think that if that’s what they’re seeing, the deck isn’t being handled properly. It’s just as likely that they’ll notice that there are only half the cards being shown. The reason people don’t notice that only 26 cards are visible is because you’re not concentrating on the face up cards . . . you’re focusing on the face down card.
Arnon says:

August 2012 at 8:48 am

Jeff: And I believe that the chances of people noticing all clubs and diamonds is much more likely than noticing the total number of cards being spread. While I agree with you that their focus is on the one face-down card, only 2 suits visible will register much more on them, considering that if the chosen card is a spade, all they will see are clubs and diamonds – no spades – and some of them will be LOOKING for spades.
1. Jeff Stone says:
  
  August 2012 at 4:06 pm
  
  @Arnon – You raise an interesting point about them looking for the matching suit of their card. I’ve never had a problem with this, however. Whenever I’m using an invisible deck, I kind of bunch the cards together as I go through them, so they’re less likely to see the cards long enough to care. It’s kind of like a 101 deck . . . you can show a 101 deck face up and 99.9% of the people won’t notice the duplicate cards. Try it out and see what kind of responses you get. I’d be interested in anyone’s else take as well. Try this out and see.
Emory Kimbrough says:

August 2012 at 10:03 pm

I’ve used a different Invisible Deck set-up for over twenty years that I’ve found to be the best combination of both deceptiveness and relative ease of use. Like Arnon, I want to avoid missing suits or missing numbers, and the solution below is THE MOST VARIED MIX POSSIBLE. My preferred solution has all four suits visible, all values Ace through King present, and thus both odd values AND even values in view. You CAN have it all.

But like Jeff, I want an easy calculation for rapid revelation and reduced chance of error. I still use the add-to-thirteen rule, but in the following method… rejoice… there is almost never any rule or calculation for suits.

Here’s how:

One side has all the odd reds and all the even blacks.
The other side thus has all the even reds and all the odd blacks.

The back-to-back cards are paired with the same suit, and they add to 13 as in the traditional set-up. Since a King is already 13, I match Heart to Spade and Diamond to Club for the Kings, the only exception to the same-suit rule.

I place the deck in the box with the odd red cards facing out, so essentially all I have to remember is “Odd Red Out.”

So, if someone calls out 4 of Clubs, I calculate 9 of Clubs – The 9 from the add-to-thirteen rule, and the Clubs because THERE IS NO SUIT CALCULATION; they just automatically have the same suit if they aren’t Kings. Done. Now I just have to orient the card box the correct way. 9 of Clubs is an odd black. Since “Odd Red Out,” an odd black must be facing in, not facing out, so I bring the deck out in that orientation. And that’s the most difficult of the four possible which-orientation deductions – 25% of the time you’ll be looking for an odd red so you won’t even have to think, and even-red and even-black only take about two or three neurons to figure out.

Or just memorize the four orientation cases instead of deducing the other three from Odd Red Out. Basically this method replaces the suit-and-orientation calculations in the traditional set-up with just an orientation calculation, so it’s a wee bit simpler even with the better all-suits-odds-and-evens mix.

Jeff is correct that quite often deck arrangements FAR more obvious than than his Invisible Deck set-up will not be noticed. Nonetheless, the Invisible Deck has been sold very widely to every kid who ever visited a tourist-trap magic shop. I believe in following Twerp Abatement procedures wherever possible, so I don’t want to trigger some pimply-faced heckler to spout off when he spots nothing but even numbers, or missing suits.

Also, we’re nerds. We thus take strong anal-compulsive pride in using the theoretical-maximum best-possible mix, even if a less varied mix would still be sufficiently deceptive nearly always.
1. Jeff Stone says:
  
  August 2012 at 6:09 am
  
  @Emory – clever . . . but still too much thinking for me. 🙂
Arnon says:

August 2012 at 5:50 am

Emory, your set-up is elegant and to my mind, optimal. Congrats and thanks for sharing it! Nerds or not, “sufficiently deceptive nearly always” is, IMO, not good enough for most professionals.
Emory Kimbrough says:

August 2012 at 6:10 pm

It’s also useful to remember which cards appear at, or near, the top and bottom of your invisible deck. Having the face-down card appear only one or two cards from the face looks curiously imbalanced, and you lose a wee bit of theatrical build-up if the card appears in the spread too soon. Having the face-down card appear on the very bottom is downright suspicious, as it would be plausible to the spectator that you could have somehow manipulated a card on the bottom. You might want to give the deck a cut before spreading to the revelation.

But memorizing is annoying. Fortunately, there’s a low-thought method for warning yourself about a card that will be revealed too near the top or bottom. Just arrange all the red cards in ascending order, interleaved with all the black cards in descending order. Try it, and you’ll see that the set-up is far less obvious than you’d expect it to be. It works well with Jeff’s stack and the traditional stack.

This arrangement has a couple of additional benefits, even if you don’t care about the reversed card appearing curiously near the face or bottom. Ideally, you want the separation and exposure of the reversed card to flow smoothly from the spreading action. But we’ve all had the experience of being kinda caught by surprise when the mate card suddenly appears in the spread, forcing you to halt and use a suspiciously different-looking pinch-and-squeeze to separate the roughed cards. So instead of…

SpreadSpreadSpreadReveal

…you get…

SpreadSpreadSpread….Pause…Adjust Finger Position…Squeeze

The ascending reds or descending blacks will give you a nice heads-up for when the mate is about to appear, allowing you to flow right into the separation. And you won’t look so curiously studious and attentive at performing the ridiculously simple task of spreading a deck to show a reversed card whose position you allegedly already know. The heads-up warning will also lessen the chance of accidentally spreading past the mate card without spotting it, forcing you to go back through the spread again. (Not a major embarrassment when it happens, but a fairly common annoyance.)

Unfortunately, this ascending-and-descending arrangement doesn’t work quite as well for the Odd-Red-Even-Black method I recommended, because it has two red aces, two red threes, two red fives, etc. Thus, the arrangement is maybe at higher risk of being detected. I’m still experimenting to find a good simple-but-well-hidden ordering for use with the Odd-Red-Even-Black method.

If you ARE worried about the ascending reds and descending blacks being detected, you can exchange each red with its nearest neighbor, and also flip each black with its nearest neighbor, as follow. It’ll still be at least somewhat low-thought to use – You’ll still instantly know roughly (heh…) whether a card will be somewhere around the top, middle, or bottom.

Reds: 2 A 4 3 6 5 8 7 10 9 Q J K
…interleaved with…
Blacks: Q K 10 J 8 9 6 7 4 5 2 3 A

A different strategy is to place cards that are the least likely to be named near the top and bottom.

There are some other interesting arrangements, but I find them to be more academically interesting than practically useful. For example, you can take the Odd-Red-Even-Black set-up a step further…

Side One: Odd Clubs and Diamonds – Even Spades and Hearts
Side Two: Odd Spades and Hearts – Even Clubs and Diamonds

This gives both deck orientations all values, all suits, some odd blacks, some even blacks, some odd reds, and some even reds. But I think that’s too small an increase in deception for too large increase in complexity.

Also, several Si Stebbins arrangements are possible. For example, you arrange the mates so that every black card is paired with the following Si Stebbins card, thus making every red card be paired with the previous Si Stebbins card. (Details left as an exercise for the reader.) This, or something similar, can also be done with some memorized-deck stacks. I find it a little harder to use, but some people advocate it as a way to practice your Si Stebbins or Memorized Deck every time you use your Invisible deck.

Finally, which stack to use depends on the performer. You may be caught more often with the simpler stack, but you may also screw up more often with the fancier stack. (You WILL occasionally goof any method even if you practice and perform frequently and attentively.) Which of these two factors will dominate will depend on how often you use the Invisible Deck, what kind of people you perform for, and whether you are naturally more or less prone to calculation errors of this type. I use the Odd-Red-Even-Black system because I keep it in real-world practice performing in restaurants four nights per week, and I often encounter highly attentive kids and teens trying to bust me, and I’m a math-and-science guy accustomed to calculating stuff. And it just FEELS like a good comfortable system to my particular tastes, maybe the most important factor. Other folks may be different.
1. Jeff Stone says:
  
  August 2012 at 7:31 pm
  
  @Emory – Thank you so much for being willing to share your thoughts on the Mag Site. I really appreciate it. It adds so much value when the readers contribute.
  
  @Everyone – Geoff Williams just sent me his thoughts on this, and they’ll be in next (August) month’s issue of the magazine.

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