talkmagic.co.uk

Title: StackView 5.0.2

Supplier: http://www.stackview.com/

Cost: Free to download (Windows self extracting exe), $5 for a CD ($7 outside the US)

Difficulty: 3 - Study required

They Say:

“StackView is a computer based simulation tool for magicians to explore and learn various aspects of controlling a stacked deck of cards. The software does not teach you any magician's principles; it is assumed that you are familiar with various card techniques, or that you have the resources to learn them elsewhere. It does however allow you to discover new possibilities with your card knowledge in a full featured simulation environment.”


I Say:

When I reviewed the previous version of StackView (version 4), I thought at the time it was impressive. That being the case, I’m struggling to describe this significant upgrade in capability. It’s probably best that I leave the hyperbole to others and just describe what you get instead.

The main window shows the face-up deck as it is manipulated by the various operations contained within the various well-specified tools. Firstly, there’s the familiar custom deck tool, which lets you order the cards in exactly the way you want them. There’s an option here to create a Sanyon Variation Deck from the first five cards. It would be nice to have Si Stebbins 3 and 4 order options too, for a given start card, but it’s a minor quibble.

The old control tool from the last version is still recognisable, but it’s now much expanded. As well as allowing you to stack the deck in a number of pre-determined ways (from Aronson to Tamariz), it allows you to perform a very respectable number of shuffles including various faros, riffles, cuts, runs and overhands. The second tab on the control window is dedicated to making selections from the deck, including free choices, forces, reverses, counts and various methods of controlling the value and suit of the card. Finally for the control tool, there’s a session recorder, enabling you to capture your ideas and play them back on different deck arrangements, or send them to others.

The next tool is all about mnemonics – systems for remembering the order of the cards in a stacked deck. The mnemonics are integrated into the testing tool, enabling you to test how well you’ve remembered your stack. You can create your own mnemonic system here or start wit ha predetermined one, and associate it with different cards, which is really useful.

The Joyal ShuffleMeter is an interesting tool. Basically, it provides you with extensive and useful statistics about the state of the deck. A very useful feature of this is the bar graph showing the distribution of cards. The height of each of 52 bars represents the value of the card, with the colour being the colour of the card. Other tabs give details of the distribution of the cards, the number of groups of different sizes, and much more.

Piles control is nothing to do with an intimate complaint but a tool that enables StackView to handle multiple piles of cards for the first time. The number of options here is, at first sight, overwhelming. There are even special cuts, such as the Elmsley Count and Jordan Count, and there’s the welcome inclusion of a Gilbreath riffle mode, to allow you to explore the possibilities presented by the little-known but potentially very powerful Gilbreath Principle.

There are now two testing tools that you can pit your wits against when learning your stack. The first simply allows you to select cards in a number of ways, including giving hints from your mnemonic system. The advanced test tool, on the other hand, gives you the opportunity to practice “any card at any number” type effects.

Finally, there’s the search tool. This takes a starting state and a finishing state for the deck, the list of allowable operations, and a maximum number of moves to achieve the finishing state. Beware, however: searching for a method can be a very time-consuming process. Estimated timescales provided by StackView range from a few seconds to a few millennia.

Conclusion

StackView is THE program for working with, learning and designing stacked decks, and for the author, Nick Pudar, it’s clearly a labour of love. The facilities now available make it a professional quality research tool. As I said last time, it won’t make you a card genius, but if you’re into stacked decks, you’ll find facilities here that will inspire you immensely and immediately, all backed by 276 pages of manual.

If you now your Si Stebbins from your Osterlind, StackView gets a definite 10/10, but if you think Gilbreath was an economist you’ll probably have no use for it. If you do like it, however, then please consider buying it on CD for $5 and supporting someone doing something genuinely useful.

Just downloaded this the other day tomo it is very useful isnt it if you wanna learn a specific stacked deck. I think its great .

Oh yes. Just goes to show what you can achieve if it's about the love of it and not the money.

I always had hard time on stack decks, I'll check this program out. Thanks for the review, Tomo!!

Just my two cents on this.

I found the program very useful. If you are lazy like me then this is one of the easiest ways to help you learn a stacked deck, and, most importantly, test yourself to see how well you have it down.

There is some support for mnemonics, although mnemonic methods themselves are not taught as far as I could see (not that I have thoroughly read through the pdf manual, though - it is quite lengthy). For this you need to consult other literature. A nice introduction is given by Derren Brown in his latest book "Tricks of the Mind".

I have since used a stack to perform a modified version of a marketed trick, as well as some standard mind-reading effects, all to very good effect. Not bad for a free program!

This is really cool software! I like the fact that you can try out different stacks and see what happens to them. It will let you carry some risk in performance.

I think it was Tomo who reveiwed the book Statistics Hacks in which there is a section on cards that shows how little a deck actually changes with one or two shuffles.

Nice review. Feel obliged to buy the CD now

I would love to see this become the norm

Downloaded essays or lecture notes (maybe "key" the download to only magicians) is great.

I wonder how many lecturers will allow their notes to be downloaded for free though?

caj

Thanks for the review Tomo. Just downloaded the app. Played with it a little bit and think it will prove very useful. Just off to purchase the cd now!......in a manner of speaking, because I'm not actually going anywhere. Ah...