There are a number of books and resources for how to *memorize* a deck, but then it kinda drop off on the *maintenance* work that one can do regularly to get and keep the memory fresh and rapid.

Here is an exercise I do when I am waiting for a bus or for the microwave to ding:

Cut your deck a few times so you genuinely don't know where the stack begins. This is just to avoid subconscious favouring of a small set of locations. In other words, as soon as you start getting repeats, do a full cut and switch the top for bottom. You genuinely don't know what the top card is, or where your stack's first card is. Now comes the exercise:

- Cut the deck and peek at the card on the bottom of the cut. Work out it's position in your mind, and add one to it. Work out what card is in that position.

- Check the cut card to make sure you were right. With practice, this will become almost second nature. Do this as fast as you can without straining so it basically looks like you can cut anywhere and (almost) instantly name the cut card without effort. It's not a race - just don't daydream or pause while doing this part. As you improve, this pause will get shorter and shorter.

- Repeat ad naseum and don't forget to finish the cut once in a while to keep muscle memory out of the equation.

It's more engaging and challenging than simply listing cards off in order, and refreshes your recall for card/position pairs in pretty much every direction you would in performance.

Nice. Someone once suggested looking at license plates, the time, or restaurant bills and coming up with the associated card as quickly as possible. You don't even need to have a deck with you to do that. To go from card to position a nice exercise is to list the positions of the cards first doing all the aces, then the twos, and so on in CHSD order.

Right on. Yeah, I was the guy who suggested read license plates, etc. Still do that. Also, prepare a deck with the Mem Deck number on the back of each card. Then shuffle the deck Triumph style, some cards face up some cards face down. Then quote the number of the memorized card or the memorized card of the number! A little challenging at first.

I memorized Aronson first, then, on Vincent Hedan's recommendation, switched to Mnemonica. I thought I could keep the two straight but Aronson got rusty fast. I don't want to use Aronson for stack-independent stuff, but there are a few excellent Aronson-stack-only effects in Try The Impossible and it would be nice to keep Aronson alive enough in memory so I can set it up on the fly and do those tricks (which, incidentally, don't need the deck to be memorized).

I do have flash card decks for both Mnemonica and Aronson, but I never thought of a Triumph mix. Ingenious! Will definitely do that. I also like this trainer:

http://huruey.webs.com

I should say that I memorized both stacks by brute force and coming up with my own mental cues and associations--something more akin to the multimodal approach Tamariz teaches. I tried the phonetic-mnemonic system, and I gave up on that fast, since it was just more stuff to remember. The brute force method was faster and since I don't fumble with a phonetic-mnemonic "crutch" the stacks are well remembered. But I do need techniques for refreshing if I want to move back and forth between Aronson and Mnemonica.

Thanks for posting this.

Les

I find this very helpful. Just like others have said, number the backs of one of your decks. Then run through it face up and separate them into odds and evens according to their stack position. When you finish, turn each pile over and check the stack numbers to see if you made a mistake. Another way is to run through the cards face down and just by reading the stack numbers try and rapidly separate the deck into red/black. Just turn the piles over and check for mistakes. Once you get good you can run through the cards face down and separate them by suits, high cards, low cards, etc. Once you can do these things rapidly and with no hesitation you have reach complete mastery of your deck. Just do it from time to time to stay fresh. Also I use the triumph style shuffled deck idea as well. Very good