The Jerx False Shuffle

Follow along with me. Take a deck in overhand shuffle position. Run five cards singly. Shuffle off. Run three cards. Toss half the deck in one chop and hold a break between the packets. Shuffle off. Cut at the break then shuffle, running the last three cards singly. You will find that the deck is back in its original order. If it didn’t work out, you screwed something up. Keep trying. Don’t read on until you get it to work.

Okay, I’m kidding. Actually, don’t do any of that.

Instead, shuffle the cards any way you like and set the cards on the table.

Talk to your friend(s) for a little bit.

Accidentally knock the deck off the table.

Have your friend help you pick up the cards. In the process of gathering the cards and settling back into your seat, switch the deck for a stacked deck.

After working on a lot of different false shuffles over a few decades now, I’ve come to the conclusion that, for me, the best false shuffle is a deck switch.

Obviously that’s not going to be the best option for every situation. It’s not a great option for when you need a false shuffle in the middle of a trick. But in the cases where I would normally start a trick with a false shuffle, I now almost always use a deck switch instead.

Here is my reasoning:

If you do a false shuffle poorly it will be spotted by the spectators.

If you do a false shuffle too casually it may be forgotten by the spectators.

And even if you do an excellent false shuffle and bring your audience’s attention to the fact that the cards are mixing, they will still not be convinced of that fact once the climax hits.

Think of it this way. Imagine you’re watching a magician. He has a deck of cards. In which scenario would you be most convinced that he didn’t know the exact order of the cards:

After one year of him shuffling the deck

or

After three seconds of you shuffling the deck

The answer is obvious. And it’s obvious to laypeople. They may not necessarily conceptualize it in these words but I think there is almost an instinctual understanding that if we’re creating a situation where the order of the cards being unknown to the magician is important, then there’s no reason why the magician should be the one to shuffle the cards.

This is normal human logic for anyone who is aware of the concept of a “false shuffle” (which most laypeople are).

This is why I’m now a deck switch man. Let the cards be mixed outside of my control, then switch in the stacked deck. I will still use some false shuffles after that point, and in the middle of the routine, but I need the audience to know we’re at least starting with a genuinely mixed deck.

I came to the “deck switch > false shuffle“ conclusion a few years ago, but it took me a couple more years to really understand the key to making that switch as imperceptible as possible.

The truth is, if I give someone a deck to shuffle and they do so, and I take it back and switch it and then I do something that can easily be explained by me knowing the order of the cards (a story-deck trick, for example), then a good portion of the audience will be suspicious that the cards were switched.

But I’ve found I can greatly reduce people thinking a deck was switched if the cards are shuffled (or mixed or otherwise disorganized) in some way before the notion of me showing them a trick comes into play. You see, if I say I’m going to show you a trick, and start by having you mix up the deck, then it suggests I have some way of dealing with the fact that you just mixed up the deck. So I think that brings to mind a switch between the mixing and the magic.

Instead, I want the spectator to have the understanding that this is a fully mixed deck, And then, at some point later, I want to start a trick with it. The shuffling isn’t part of the trick. But still the deck is known to be in no particular order.

So the deck of cards might fall to the floor. Or we might have just used the deck for a card-game. Or maybe I gave the spectator the deck and asked her to show me a card trick. And then after one of those situations I switch the deck. Wait a few more moments and only then do I start the trick.

When I choreograph the moment like that, I find the people I perform for to be the most fooled and the idea of a switch of the deck almost never comes up.

(And to save me some emails, I don’t have a set deck switch. I just casually handle the deck while talking (before the trick has started) and at an opportune moment I drop it into my lap while coming up with the other one. Or I switch it while adjusting my chair. Or something like that. I don’t need something that holds up to scrutiny because it happens before they know to scrutinize. If you need a burnable deck switch, this download from Ben Earl looks pretty good.)