I was doing some magic at an event the other day and came up with something on the fly after things went wrong.

To be perfectly fair, it isn't spectacular but it works and I have never seen it in print.

Quite simply, I had a gentleman cut off a packet of cards from the stack and hold it to his chest. After some patter, I asked him to tilt the pack as to allow him to peek the face card. Once it is known, shuffle that pack. As no one else could see, and even the back wasn't visible to use marks, his card is known only to him.

Spread that packet face up on the table and there is a mix of cards. Look for the highest (by stack number) one. I looked down, started looking for cards in the 30s and 20's. Saw 6H which is 23 in Mnemonica, a quick double check to see if anything was higher and I knew that was his selected card.

This also left the bottom half of the deck still stacked, cut to an ostensibly random location, and out of my hands entirely. I did a little jazzing by having his wife take the next three cards off the top and hide them in various pockets and a few other things.

Don't know if this will come useful to anyone here, but there it is. If your deck is stacked 1-52 and a spectator cuts, the face card will be the highest stack number in the packet they're holding.

Enjoy,
-a

The idea is good, of course, but calling it "new method", well ...

You don't even need to check the faces of the cards. If the pack was in 1-52 order, all you have to do is count the cards: twenty-three? That's your selection's stack number.

Seriously, this is pretty standard ideas for memdeck workers.
So, no, you haven't found any groundbreaking use for a memorised deck.

A fantastic use of this kind of ideas, which involve three specs (but destroys the stack), may be found in Sebastian's Penguin Live Lecture.

Mark

Yes, that's much better. Ed Marlo wrote about it in 1956.

Mike

Various people have come up with effects where the performer is able to divine cards cut to by usually 4 spectators. Each card subtly sets you up to know the next one, when using a stacked deck.
Off the top of my head I can think of such effects by Aronson (of course), Jan Foster, and Darwin Ortiz. I think Darwin's leaves the stack in order.

Your are correct... e. g. my one is "Under Test Conditions" (in various publications and in my first Penguin Magic Lecture...), and notabene (superb also for your own studies) is Simon Aronson's "Four Part Harmony" (in "The Aronson Approach"). Jan

Yeah I'm familiar with counting the cards from a 1-52, in this case, he was the second spectator to cut some cards off so I couldn't count them and after his shuffle it was easiest to simply look down and see the highest card. It wasn't something I planned.

I've been doing mem-deck work for about a decade now and I always find a way to get to the card. It was just funny to me that after so long I found a way I hadn't seen or tried. Likely because there are so many other better ways that already exist. It was just a nice bit of candy in the moment.