Spex Mix: False Shuffles - A Thought Experiment
/I was searching through tricks I’ve performed that I’ve collected data on over the past eight years, looking for any patterns in the strongest material. This is something I do every 12-18 months or so, like a prostate exam. (I know you don’t have to do them that frequently, but my doctor really loves it.)
This time through, I noticed something that connected a lot of the strongest card tricks that I do: they all have an element where the spectator controls and mixes the cards in some way.
More and more, I’m beginning to think that time spent on false cuts and false shuffles is totally wasted time. These techniques only fool other magicians and professional card cheats.
That might seem like a weird statement, but consider this thought experiment…
I put up a video on Twitter of Barack Obama saying that he supports Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
Everyone looks at it and says, “This can’t be real. It’s a deepfake. Obama would never say that.”
Now, the truth is, it is a deepfake. But I have deepfake technology that is 100 times better than any in existence. It’s masterful. It creates a video with none of the telltale signs of deepfakes. There are no glitches. There’s no distorted lighting. There’s no blurred edges. The audio and video sync up perfectly. Even Obama’s blink rate is spot-on.
Remember, this technology is 100 times more powerful than anything that is currently out there. In fact, it’s alien-technology from the future that nobody but me knows about. The video has every hallmark of being real.
When deepfake experts take a look at the video, they say: “This is genuine.”
When non-experts look at the video, they say:
“Oh, it’s a deepfake.”
The only ones fooled are the experts.
I think a similar thing happens with false shuffles. You can get good enough to convince a magician or card cheat that that your shuffle is legitimate. But you can never get good enough to convince non-magicians.
If they’ve heard of “false shuffles” (and most have) they don’t know about Zarrows or Push-Thru shuffles. They just know that there are some ways to make it look like you’re shuffling when you’re really not. And if there’s a way to do that, then every shuffle that you do is potentially suspect. Especially if you’re focusing on the cards when you do it.
The false shuffle is like the deepfake. People know about them, but they’re not experts enough in them to know when a shuffle (or a video) isn’t fake. So anything can potentially be fake. No matter how good you get.
Outside of taking people’s money in a card game, the only point in getting really good at false shuffles is to say to people, “Hey, look how good I am at false shuffles!” There are people who do make a living at that, but in social situations, this is of limited value. And, in fact, the more you do it, the bigger a loser you’ll seem.
The only solution is to get the cards into the spectator’s hands for all, or at least part, of the mixing procedure. I’m pretty convinced that allowing them to cut the deck in their hands a few times gives them a greater sense that the cards are in an unknown order than if you were to spend five minutes doing the most perfect false shuffles ever performed.
And it just makes logical sense, too. If my goal is to have you believe the cards are in a random order, then of course I wouldn’t be the one to do the shuffling. If you need random numbers for a trick, does the magician name them? Of course not.
With these thoughts in mind, in the coming weeks, I’m going to be highlighting ideas and techniques that allow the spectator to do some of the mixing with a pre-arranged deck of cards. These techniques will not get you the cachet with other magicians that a perfect false shuffle will. But as tools for creating wonder and mystery, I think they’re much more powerful.
To get you started, here are some of the posts I’ve written in the past on some of these types of techniques.