Consider this.
Your in a position where it is imperative that you know how many cards there are in the deck, but cannot count them openly. Thing is, they really need a shuffle.
Try this.
Hold the cards in position to break for the in-the-hands faro. Riffle 7 or 8 cards from the bottom. (we’ll assume 7 for this walkthrough). OutFaro these cards into the top of the deck, breaking the cards as you square them, at the last card of the weave. This is now 14 cards. Repeat the process. Now its 28. Now if you faro the cards and you were counting a full deck of 52, there would be a bigger packet faroing into a smaller one. Simply count by sight the cards that haven’t been faroed and subtract that from your last double number, it should be a smallish number.
And you have the correct number of cards in the deck in your head. And it looks like you just shuffled.
I haven’t come up with an application for this yet, but… um. There might be one.
Marlo probably published this before as well, but to be fair, he’s published everything ever.
Arthur
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I’m not trying to take a stab at you or anything here, but can you name a few situations where counting the deck would not be permissible?
Cheers,
Comment by Shanku 15 February, 2009 @ 3:10 amShanku
O god no.
It just occurred to me.
And since I’ll write down anything, it’s here.
This isn’t really a gambling thing anyway. In an effect, it would be weird to just say “oo i must just count the deck”. Its probably the sort of thing used in a mathematical self working trick sort of thing.
Maybe…
Comment by vaardgrim 15 February, 2009 @ 3:57 pm