The Memorized Deck: All You Need to Know

Dear friend,

What are you meant to do when you’re known as ‘the magic kid’, but you hate performing?

Well, that used to be my life. I hated that label.

Truth is, I really did feel like a fraud. I knew my card handling skills were average at best. I didn’t have anything original.

I was bitter, frustrated, and resigned to using other people’s overpriced gimmicks to act like I had skills I didn’t.

Frankly, I’d had enough.

I was up against a wall. There was so much going on. I had exams, work, a job…a life!

So I put the cards down.

After all, if I really wanted to be the best—I would need to put all of those things to one side and sink years of effort and countless hours of practice in.

There was no other way.

At least, that’s what I thought.

Fast forward a few years to now.

Nowadays, I love performing. I can’t get enough of it!

I don’t get the same overwhelming nerves when someone asks me to show them something.

So what happened?

I discovered the Memorised Deck. 

With this system in my back pocket, I know that I can, at a moment’s notice, perform the greatest effects in magic—without worrying about ‘screwing up.’

Better yet, it lets me create my own original effects—it makes me FEEL like an artist.

If you want to perform powerful magic but:

* don’t want to spend decades locked up in your room

* have ‘real-life’ commitments that only enable you to practice for a few minutes a day

* think you’re ‘too old’ to master the hard stuff

This system will unlock magic you didn’t even realize was possible—all by leveraging ONE thing that all of you possess.

Your mind.

Two Simple Sentences That Change Everything…

The underlying working of the memorized deck can be summarised in two simple sentences—but don’t let that fool you. The possibilities these sentences unlock are seemingly endless.

Here they are:

• For any CARD in the deck, you instantly know the POSITION of it.
• For any POSITION in the deck, you instantly know the CARD there. 

For example, if someone were to ask me where the Jack of Hearts is in the deck, I’d be able to instantly answer them by saying ‘20’.

Likewise, if someone were to ask me what card was at position 44, I’d be able to tell them ‘The 9 of Clubs.’

A stacked deck is a deck in which the position of each of the 52 cards (from 1 to 52) has been committed to memory.

This may sound simple, but it’s so POWERFUL!

Insanely Cool Tricks YOU Can Do With A Memorised Deck

Memorised Deck effects will fall into one of the 4 categories, but they can vary wildly between themselves based on their ‘angle’ and position within that view. 

1: Mental

Convince your audience that your mind has powers beyond most mortals by revealing cards they’re thinking of, displaying stunning feats of memory and intuition, and finding cards lost in a shuffled deck!

The memorized deck makes all of the above ‘child’s play’. In fact, the effects listed above are some of the MOST basic effects you can do with a memorized deck.  

Now, let me tell you about one of my favourite magicians: Chan Canasta

Chan is a notoriously difficult magician to find taped performances of—due in large part to the fact he was performing way back in the 50s and 60s!

However, here’s the good news:

There’s one ‘uncut’ 30-minute performance from Chan on YouTube that is, alone, a masterclass in using the memorized deck to achieve the ‘viewing experiences’ we’re discovering. 

2: Coincidental

Create moments that are ‘impossible coincidences’. 

Cards appear at randomly chosen numbers, the spectator freely chooses cards that exactly match yours, and so many more instances of ‘fate’ that can only be explained by magic (or, y’know, a memorized deck.)

Sometimes it feels like the memorized deck was devised with this category of effect in mind—because it makes it so EASY to create stunning coincidences with barely a finger lifted.

NOTE: When I say ‘coincidence’ I mean it in the strongest possible sense of the word. In fact, it’s a good idea to imagine that every time I say ‘coincidence’ I’m really saying ‘an impossible coincidence that simply couldn’t have happened…but it did.’ 

Here’s a great example of that:

Alright, the first effect in that video doesn’t need a memorized deck—but it’s so funny I figured I’d keep it in there anyway 🙂

The routine we’re here for is the one Juan uses to close this act—the ‘Any Card At Any Number’ (ACAAN.)

Now, there’s a lot going on in this effect that we won’t go into right now. Don’t worry, we’ll be talking about ACAANs later on in the course…and maybe even later in this module after a fashion 😉

What I’m concerned with is not so much the method as it is the EFFECT. 

The effect is a perfect example of what I call ‘coincidental’ magic. Where two things line up that the magician surely had no control over—such as a playing card and a freely named number. 

The ‘coincidental’ isn’t just limited to ACAAN though. Not by a country mile. 

Here’s another example of a stunning effect that appears to be a sheer, mind boggling coincidence:

That clip is one of the most satisfying of all the magic videos I’ve seen. Again, it uses a memorized deck to create a stunning ‘coincidence’ on Live TV!

It’s also a wonderful example of improvisation using a memorized deck, but again—more on that later.  

There are so many more possible ‘coincidences’ you can do with a memorized deck.

3: Technical

Display stunning skill with playing cards—even when you have NONE at all! The memorized deck is like ‘cheat codes’ for sleight of hand demonstrations.  

Alright, here’s a category very close to my heart. 

I’ve always wanted people to THINK I was an expert sleight of hand artist—but I never had the ‘goods’ to back up that claim. 

When I discovered the memorized deck, I was thrilled to find out that I could perform routines that seem to rely on cardshark level moves without actually being a cardshark!

With the memorized deck, you can (among MUCH more) apparently control named cards to certain locations, pluck four of a kind out of the deck, and deal winning poker hands at a whim. 

Here’s a couple of great case studies that’ll show you just how cool this stuff is:

See that?

Darwin is one of the best card handlers in the world. He’s as close as you get to the ‘real thing.’

Scratch that—he IS the real thing. 

And while it might entertain his ego to try and pull off that kind of thing using sleight of hand alone, the memorized deck makes it so stunning that there’s no better option. 

That’s why many people pick up a memorized deck—to do stuff like you just saw. Direct, hard-hitting magic that gives you an aura of legendary skill. 

(note – the effect above appears in Darwin’s book Scams and Fantasies with Cards.)

Now, no discussion of the memorized deck would be complete without a poker demonstration. Here’s my personal favorite:

A lot of people might not immediately think of poker routines when they heard the words ‘memorized deck.’

Instead, they’ll probably imagine some kind of move-monkey card cheat procedure. 

Sure, in cases, that works. 

But I find that the memorized deck offers the best of both worlds—it LOOKS like you’re some kind of cardshark, but in reality, anyone with a basic level of skill with playing cards could do it.  

(The routine above appears in ‘In Order To Amaze’ by Pit Hartling.) 

We’ll be talking more about poker deals later in the course, but I should point out that they are definitely not the only example of the ‘technical’ view—far from it!

4: Musical

Improvise, jam, and put together miracles on the spur of the moment—creating unique ‘one of a kind’ moments that will never be repeated! 

Just like watching rock n’ roll concerts, the memorized deck is the greatest tool in magic for creating the ‘moment’ with your audiences—moments that have only happened once, and won’t happen again for anyone else! It’s special, and they feel it too. 

This is a hard one to talk about, because so much of it is based on subjective things like how an effect ‘feels.’

The best analogy I’ve found is that of watching a live music concert. 

The feeling of ‘what’s going to happen next?’, the focus on ‘the moment’ and how things just ‘happen’ and then are over before you know what just hit you. 

Again, maybe that’s too abstract. 

Maybe an example might help:

It was hard to find a suitable ‘demo’ of this because the very nature of the ‘musical’ view is that it is so often unplanned, unpredictable, spur of the moment stuff—and so there’s no one carrying a camera around and taping the performance.  

However, I did manage to grab ONE, and it’s a doozy. 

It’s an apparent impromptu close-up show by Juan Tamariz at Magic-con in 2010. 

The funny thing is, I don’t believe this performance even uses a memorized deck—so don’t watch it trying to spot that kind of thing.  

Rather, watch it to get a sense for the FEELING I’m trying to describe. That feeling that you’re watching something that is truly a ‘one of a kind’ performance, that no one but you will see.  

Here’s part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0MLJ1u0_KE

Here’s part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3YqC93GPHM

Another good example of this view is the Chan Canasta footage we watched earlier in the module. In this performance, he interacts with his audience and adapts what he performs based on what THEY ask him. 

At one point, one of the audience asks him how he made her pick a certain card. He then demonstrates with ANOTHER baffling coincidence effect. 

See how he used a ‘coincidence’ effect within a ‘musical’ context? 

As far as we know, he wasn’t planning on doing this effect. But since they asked him to, he improvised and pulled it off ‘on the spot’ just like a Live music group might ask their crowd to ‘suggest a song’ for them. 

(or at least, that’s how it looks—which is what we care about.) 

As far as I’ve found, there is no one ‘type’ for this kind of magic. 

In fact, it can combine some of the three categories we’ve already talked about—creating a hybrid, unique experience that can only be described as ‘musical’ in its nature. 

It’s by far the most difficult view to pull off—but when you do, the rewards are the greatest. 

I think you should ALWAYS be aiming for this view, but don’t worry if it takes time to get to. 

You need to be confident in your understanding of the memorized deck and how it works to get there. 

How To Learn The Memorised Deck TODAY: Your Call To Adventure…

Now, usually, when the term ‘memorized deck’ and ‘stack’ come up, magicians start asking all kinds of questions. Questions like:

• Which stack should I learn?
• Which stack is the best?
• Which stack does (so and so) use?

Look. I get why people ask that.

But they’re the WRONG questions!

What they should be asking themselves is…

How can I quickly learn ANY number of stacks so that I can perform ANY effect I want to?

Now, we want to give you the chance to get your hands on our ‘Memorized Deck Starter Pack’. 

Over the course of this powerful and extremely detailed training video—exactly 2 hours and 51 minutes in runtime—you’ll learn…

* Our complete training on how to memorize the deck—including 3 hours of video training and 6000+ words.

* The ‘holy grail’ of card magic e.g. ‘Any Card at Any Number’

* A 3-part masterclass in the Weighing the Cards routine—including how to perform this effect after the spectator’s have genuinely shuffled the deck

* Our take on Juan Tamariz’s ‘Neither Blind Nor Stupid’

* One of the most powerful effects in card magic—an effect that uses famous T.V family The Simpsons as a ‘failsafe’

Click here to check it out: Memorised Deck Starter Pack