I would like to buy Michael Closes books Workers 5 to learn about his use of the Memorized deck. I have his Very, Very Close video that dealt with the use of the decks and I liked the effects he did although some of it looked very hard. I was wondering if any of you had the book and what you thought about it. I don't mind memorizing the deck, but I thought some of the stuff he did where he cut to a certain card looked really hard. Any feedback

Are you looking for info on memorizing the deck or tricks to do after you have memorized the deck?

If you're looking to Memorize a memorized deck...I suggest Simon Aronson's books. I believe that Simon's stack is the one Mike uses in his memorized deck work. Also, there is a book "Six Hours to a Memorized Deck" that my friend swears by. I don't do memorized deck work myself but have seen the huge impact that it carries. It's just not MY thing. Good luck with it!

I'm looking for info about tricks that you can do with the memorized deck. As I understand, the process of really coming to know the deck is a matter of just sitting down and working with it. I noticed is Michael's video that several of his tricks involved cutting to a specific card in the deck or cutting exactly eleven cards off the top of the deck. He also recommends as a drill to practice cutting to each card in the deck in order by suit. I've never used a memorized deck before or tried to cut off specific numbers of cards or tried to do six perfect faro shuffles to change the order of the deck for one trick. After memorizing the deck it seems like I would still need a great amount of technical skill to do the effects he presented. I was thinking about buying the book after seeing the video, and I don't mind putting in the practice to do the effects. I was just wondering, after memorizing the deck how many other things would I need to be able to do to perform the tricks in the book. Do all of the effects require a high level of technical skill or could I do something after just memorizing the deck.

The book is excellent, but I agree with others if memorized deck work is your interest, start with Simon Aronson. He has great effects and a great stack to learn.

Simon Aronson's memorized deck stack (A STACK TO REMEMBER) is currently available in the book BOUND TO PLEASE.

To answer your question, 27, the memorized deck is just a tool. There are lots of routines out there, some using sleights, some not.

HI rsummer27,

the tricks you saw performed by Michael Close are what we call "Stack Independant", which means that they can be done with ANY stack (Aronson, Joyal, Tamariz, Green, Rix, your own....).

So before you go any further, you need to do some research on which particular memorized deck you want to learn (read; memorize).

There are 4 main points to consider when you decide to choose which stack to memorize (listed in no particular order):

-Does it look like a shuffled deck?
-How easy is it to memorize?
-Will it remains in your memory for a long time?
-Are there any built-in tricks? (that you will actually use!)

The way you prioritize these questions will lead you to the right stack to memorize.

I have a friend who decided to memorized the Si Stebbins stack when you do Darwin Ortiz's Si Stebbins secret with a New Deck, as he prefers the built-in effects that can be done with a Si Stebbins order rather than the built-in features of the Aronson Stack.

I strongly recommend you buy Simon Aronson's "Bound to Please" book, which will explain in details the builtin features of the Aronson stack and also the mnemonics to learn it, as well as some great routines. Even if you decide to choose to learn another memorized deck (like I have) you still have some good routines in this book, so there is no money wasted.

Hope this help!

Ronnie Lemieux
Montreal
Canada

Oh, and this might be a good read before you go any further:

http://www.simonaronson.com/Memories%20A......This.pdf

and once you decided which stack to learn, you might want to download Nick Pudar's "Stack View" program at
http://www.stackview.com


Ronnie Lemieux
Montreal
Canada

This volume of Workers is for card workers only...