talkmagic.co.uk

That's great advice, swest! I certainly started out using way too much pressure, to the point of losing the packet a couple of times and knackering a few cards in the process. The placement of the thumbs has bothered me for some time, too. It's blatant that it's important where you have them, but knowing where is another matter. I'd pretty much deduced that the tighter you get in on that corner, the more control you have, but at the same time, you increase the pressure, so I wasn't 100% sure about it. Happy medium, I guess, and it's good to have it confirmed.

My new decks finally arrived this morning, and it seems I've lucked in with the quality of them. I must have caught a new set of blades! As mentioned above I'd been practicing with old decks while waiting for the new ones to arrive - I'd much have preferred learning with new decks from the start, but I think struggling with the old decks may actually have benefited me in some way - kind of like training with wrist and ankle weights on. I was shocked at how easily they wove.

Glad the new cards are working for you.

In my (limited) experience now you have the 'feel' your technique will spiral up - you'll even be able to go back to old cards and do it - just don't expect perfect weaves with them You'll know straight away if a deck's up to it or not.

A thousand gambling effects start here

Next Up: Spend a million hours learning to unweave them with angle-seperation

Mr_Grue
One way to take away the worry of "blade quality" is to file the cards. I picked it up from a Stepen Youell CD. Use an emery board nail file and run it along the sides of the deck. He recommends starting with the coarsest grit first and ending with the finest. I have tried this and the edges feel like glass and fully aligned. I have also spruced up a partially worn deck like this. Mr Youell reckons that the life of the deck is increased substantially, and that once you are used to doing it you will never go back. I have also heard the Alex Elmsley did something similar to the corners to improve faros, but don't have details.

Cutting the deck exactly in half is usually made significantly easier in practice since if your effect reley on you doing one or more perfect faroes, you usually know exactly what card (or type of card e.g. red or black) you need to cut to.

In my repotoire I mainly use the faro in impromptu situations as the last step to setup the cards alternating red/black thoughout the deck. This setup can then be utilised in a number of ways. What ever you do, it must of course be fast, intertaining and well rehearsed.

Yes yes, dredging up this thread again! I've started to use the faro on people now. I've worked out a nice effect where two cards are selected from a deck, and replaced in such a way that by the end of the trick, the deck is in order save for the two cards which have now swapped places.

I really enjoy doing it, mainly because about halfway through the patter it appears that the trick I'm doing is just me fooling around. Once the cards are reintroduced, I shuffle the deck once or twice (depending on how I feel) click my fingers and then announce that the cards have changed places. People sometimes visibly slump when I say this. I'll sometimes even quickly fan through the deck to "show" that the cards have swapped. So not only am I a fool, but the deck is "genuinely shuffled". I then say something along the lines of "well, I can see you're not impressed, and maybe even that you don't believe that the cards have changed places at all. It looks like I'll have to prove it to you." I then run through the remaining shuffles, ask them which cards they chose, and fan through the deck to show it in order with the two cards switched.

Asking the specs what cards they've chosen is important because (and with disturbing frequency) they may select two mate cards, or sequential cards. When this happens, the fact that they have swapped isn't always obvious. Also it serves as a slight misdirection. Does the 'gician switch the cards the second he hears what they are? Now that's a skill worth having! And the re-ordering of the deck is a more impressive feat than switching the two cards, which gives the reveal more prestige.

The only real danger with it is that if you're cutting to the 26th card by glimpsing it and having the 26th card sequence remembered, there's nothing to stop the specs picking one of the sequence cards. That's why it's handy to have a decent understanding of what the surrounding cards are, which is fairly easy to grasp. If you're smooth and confident enough, of course, when you see a card sitting where a sequence card ought to be, you'll know what the two chosen cards are, so rather than ask the specs, you can tell them which cards they chose (though obviously not necessarily who picked what).

There is another method for this trick, but it involves having 2652 decks hidden about your person and very smooth switching powers. You can PM me for the index I use.

I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to add something that I learned in the past few months while learning to faro (is dredging up old threads strongly frowned upon?).

First, I should say that I faro corner-to-corner. Or more like corner to side near corner.

In any case, I've learned that different bicycle decks sometimes faro differently, even when they are brand new. More specifically: when I faro, the packets are on their sides, with their faces to the left (usually), and the backs to the right. Well, I have found that some new bicycle decks won't faro that way. Instead, if I turn the faces to the *right* and the backs to the *left* (i.e. reversing the orientation of the deck), *then* I get a smooth faro. It's weird, but it's definitely true.

I guess this boils down to switching from a top-down to a bottom-up faro, but I'm just saying that even new cards can have a very strong bias for one over the other.