@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.

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.

@Emory – clever . . . but still too much thinking for me. 🙂

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.

@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.

@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.