Tag Archives: stack

Under A Spell: Any Card Named Spelled To

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Yet one more for the magic nerds, and to make matters worse, it’s for a subset of a subset of us. Namely for those of us who have taken Simon Aronson’s most famous creation to heart…and mind.

For a long time, I’ve pondered how to spell to any card named in a deck of cards. Any card. And  in almost all cases, to do it completely hands off, with only the spectator handling the cards and doing the spelling.

Well, the pandemic has given me a lot of time to think about it, and I finally wrote up the complete way to do it. I was thinking of asking a couple of dollars for it, but then I thought what the heck, I’ll give it away for free. All I ask is that you send me some feedback on it after you read through it. The method of course assumes you are already a committed Aronsonite.

You can get a copy of the pdf for reading or download by clicking here

Out of Sorts: A Simple Way To Achieve Card Regularity

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Here’s a first world problem: You have a shuffled deck of cards, and you want to restore the deck to New Deck Order or some other pre-determined stack arrangement.

With a table, it’s easy, but sometimes a table isn’t available, so an in-the-hands-sort is required. Here’s something that might be useful to some card workers. I use the following mainly as an in-the-hands sort for NDO. I’ve used it as well for Aronson, but it can be generalized to any stack:

Run through the deck upjogging all the black cards. Pull out the black cards to the face of deck.

Run through the deck upjogging all the spades and diamonds. Pull out this half to the face of deck.

Spread the bottom 13 spades and arrange in order with the right hand as if arranging a bridge hand. Cut those 13 cards to the top of deck. Repeat with the next three suits. You are now in New Deck Order. Bicycle New Deck Order simply requires you to pull out Spades and Diamonds in descending order, Clubs and Hearts in ascending order.

To generalize for any stack:

1) Upjog all cards within the ranges of 14-26 and 40-52, and cut to face of deck.
2) Upjog all cards within the ranges of 27-52 and cut to the face of the deck.
3) Spread 13 cards at a time and put in ascending order, then cut to back of deck. Repeat three more times.

With practice you can get into stack order quite quickly.