faro shuffle

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Bill Mullins
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faro shuffle

Postby Bill Mullins » December 24th, 2014, 1:45 am

The ConjuringCredits website attributes the first descriptions of faro shuffles to two 1894 works: Koschitz's Manual of Useful Information, and Maskelyne's Sharps and Flats. S. Brent Morris in 2006 (Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Faro Shuffle* *but were afraid to ask) quotes "An Adept" in A Grand Exposé of the Science of Gambling (1860):

After shuffling them a sufficient length of time, the dealer suddenly, and with a slight movement of his hands, pulls or strips the deck as above described; then taking one half the deck in one hand, and the other half in the other hand, and placing the ends together, runs them in, thereby displacing every card in the deck by the process of running them.


Here are a couple of descriptions of Faro Shuffles from newspapers that interdate An Adept and Koschitz/Maskelyne.

From the Chicago Inter Ocean, 7/10/1875, p. 5:
[after a discussion of a stripped/roughed deck, in which half are convexly belly-stripped and lightly sanded on the faces ("rounds") and half are simply made slightly narrower and sanded on the backs ("straights")]
The dealer in shuffling can separate the rounds from the straights by holding the cards near the end with his left hand, and drawing the rounds out with his right. Having the cards separated, twenty-six in each hand, he makes the ends even by gently tapping the end of one-half against the faces of the other half. He then places the two ends together on the table, and by pressing them together and raising his hands he passes each alternate card over the other, from the bottom to the top of the deck, thus bringing the sanded face of one card to the sanded back of the other.


From the Brooklyn Standard Union, 12/08/1888, p 5

The sandpaper is again brought into use. The two narrow edges of the even cards are filed down, wedge like, the movement of the sandpaper being from the back of the card to front. This delicate work being done, the odd cards are treated likewise, only the rubbing is done from the front to the rear. When this process is completed, it is found that the two piles, odd and even, being put end to end for shuffling purposes, the sharp end of the even cards will dovetail in the filed-off place of the odd cards in such a way that, the two piles being pushed together, they will form into one entire pack, running odd and even, card for card, from bottom to top.


Image

[Note that Alex Elmsley reinvented the sanding technique -- see Minch, Collected Works of Alex Elmsley Vol 2 (1994) pp 295-296]

Philippe Billot
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Re: faro shuffle

Postby Philippe Billot » December 24th, 2014, 2:51 am

here http://magiki.wikispaces.com/Faro+Shuffle, there is a reference of a book from 1726 entitled Whole Art and Mystery of Modem Gaming but I can't cheek because I haven't this book.

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Re: faro shuffle

Postby Jonathan Townsend » December 24th, 2014, 9:56 am

Philippe Billot wrote:here http://magiki.wikispaces.com/Faro+Shuffle, there is a reference of a book from 1726 entitled Whole Art and Mystery of Modem Gaming but I can't cheek because I haven't this book.


Great finding. I suspect our current generation of serious students is about ready to scan and wiki up older references.
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Bill Mullins
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Re: faro shuffle

Postby Bill Mullins » December 24th, 2014, 4:55 pm

Philippe Billot wrote:here http://magiki.wikispaces.com/Faro+Shuffle, there is a reference of a book from 1726 entitled Whole Art and Mystery of Modem Gaming but I can't cheek because I haven't this book.


Note that at the conjuringcredits link, they discuss this book, and find that it doesn't describe a faro shuffle.

It is a pretty scarce book (the recent book on mathematical magic by Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham says that a modern reprint is available on Amazon, but I don't find it). Diaconis mentioned it in a 1983 paper about the mathematics of perfect shuffles (he specifically said it described milk-build shuffles), and I'd bet that in most of the subsequent occasions where it is said to describe faro shuffles, whoever is so saying is making an unsupported inference from carelessly reading Diaconis's paper (or are repeating the mistake from someone else, into 2nd and 3rd generations).

The wikispaces link is (like many wikis) not altogether accurate (note that it dates Erdnase to 1901, not 1902). It says that Green's 1843 book has a reference to faro shuffles, but it doesn't -- it speaks only of perfect shuffles.

Brad Henderson
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Re: faro shuffle

Postby Brad Henderson » December 24th, 2014, 7:34 pm

I first encountered the idea of filing the edges of cards in Elliott's Last Legacy. In that example, however, the filing was not meant to better allow a faro, but to cause two cards to stay together during a shuffle. I believe it was meant to cause them to stay together during an overhand style shuffle.

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Eoin O'hare
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Re: faro shuffle

Postby Eoin O'hare » December 24th, 2014, 7:38 pm

I have a scan of the book.
I think these links refer to the shuffle in question, it's in the section on the game of faro. Which may be where the confusion comes from.
https://flic.kr/p/pzEgdR
https://flic.kr/p/pzrmi7
https://flic.kr/p/qwwkYs
Last edited by Eoin O'hare on December 25th, 2014, 4:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Richard Kaufman
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Re: faro shuffle

Postby Richard Kaufman » December 24th, 2014, 9:48 pm

There are people who have referred to the Faro Shuffle as the Perfect Shuffle, so perhaps it should be established that a Perfect Shuffle really means a "perfect" Riffle Shuffle, while a Faro Shuffle is a technique for shuffling.
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Brad Jeffers
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Re: faro shuffle

Postby Brad Jeffers » December 24th, 2014, 11:11 pm

I appreciate the link to the Faro Shuffle Simulator. This will simplify things, that previously, I had to work out by hand.


The sandpaper is again brought into use. The two narrow edges of the even cards are filed down, wedge like, the movement of the sandpaper being from the back of the card to front. This delicate work being done, the odd cards are treated likewise, only the rubbing is done from the front to the rear. When this process is completed, it is found that the two piles, odd and even, being put end to end for shuffling purposes, the sharp end of the even cards will dovetail in the filed-off place of the odd cards in such a way that, the two piles being pushed together, they will form into one entire pack, running odd and even, card for card, from bottom to top.

Image


Although this process should work for the task mentioned (alternating odd and even cards from bottom to top, after a single shuffle), my mind's eye is telling me, that if you want to do more than one faro shuffle with these cards, you're going to be in for a mess of trouble.


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