"Fastest Faro" trivia

[Guest]

Greetings,

Is there a record for the fastest number of 8 Out Faros on a deck of 52 cards done in the hands?

On a good day, my time is 45 seconds :)

I have read in certain places that there are about 30 people who can do complete it in under a minute. Any confirmations?

Is there an analogue record for tabled-faros?


thanks,
hai.

[Guest]

After much sweat, toil, and tears, I can rage through faros at the blazing rate of one per hour. ;)


_________________________________________________________
www.conjurenation.com - 'Cards Only' Forums

[Pete Biro]

I'll try to find out, but to my limited knowledge the record was held be either Harry Riser or Persi Diaconis. :cool:

Mike Close may know. :confused:

[Guest]

There has been no OFFICIAL timing of Faro Shuffles. Most reports, like Pete Biro's, are anecdotal. Marlo was the first to name and publish a technique for executing CLOCKED FARO SHUFFLES. In FARO CONTROLLED MIRACLES Marlo wrote that the average time for eight OUT shuffles is about 60 seconds. Using the Clocked Faro technique, you can trim about 15 seconds.

I once wanted to stage a Cardman Olympics with "clocked" events such as successive faro shuffles and Charlier Cuts. Charles Bertram (in Expert Card Technique) allegedly could do 80 Charlier Cuts in 60 seconds. My personal record (when I actually did this sort of thing) was 72 cuts.

I'm sure Riser and Diaconis were efficient Faro Shufflers; however, with age one loses a step or two.

I timed Marlo once at 51 seconds.

Maybe the Flourish Guys can set new records?

In the Big Easy, we tend to take things slowly. Like the old gag has it, down here it takes everyone an hour and a half to watch "Sixty Minutes."

Onward...
(at a snail's pace)

[Pete Biro]

Roc oh... yes... Olympics style

You know what I wanted to do?

Have a competition ala figure skating.

You have to do "compulsories" ie: Vernon's Triumph and Cups and Balls and Slydini's coins through the table, and maybe a second dealing, bottom dealing and palming excercise.

AS WRITTEN, NO IMPROVMENTS.

Then "Free Style" whatever you want with originality the highest point getter.

[Guest]

Thanks for that guys. I thought I had Faro controlled miracles and accidentally looked over the Clocked Faro Technique. But I was wrong, I only have RCT, which doesn't have that particular booklet! will keep my eyes open for it.

Things that help with faster faros: knowing what card to cut to, and simply squaring up rather than springing the cards together after each faro. Am very interested in the Clocked faro technique...

hai.

[Guest]

Just curious how this stuff is "practical" in performance? :)

[Guest]

Mark Tams asks: "Just curious how this stuff is "practical" in performance?"

Watching a magician slowly and laboriously faro shuffle cards together isn't exactly interesting to an audience...so the faster and more effortlessly it's done, the better.

[Guest]

There's a funny story in the Fechter book about how a magician was bragging about his ability to do something like 50 or 100 classic passes in under a minute. Fechter's wry response was something like, "wow, I can't even force a card that fast."

I've played around with lots of effects and routines that involve a lot of faro work. But in the end, I've found that routining to eliminate some of the faros is usually best. Of course, my view on this is tainted by my inability to do a lot of perfect faros in anything even resembling "record" time. And I'll tell you, man, a minute in front of a live audience is an eternity.

I've got a handling of Simon's March of Colors that requires one perfect faro of the entire deck. And there's some great stuff by Tamariz that's worth learning to be able to do a perfect faro in front of a live audience. Most other tricks that require faro work I've routined down to a straddle faro of just a portion of the deck.

The key I supposed isn't being able to do eight faros in record time, but being able to justify what you're doing as well as engage and entertain the audience no matter how long it takes you.

I do hold some binge drinking records, but that's another story....

[Guest]

Originally posted by Pete Biro:
Roc oh... yes... Olympics style

You know what I wanted to do?

Have a competition ala figure skating.

You have to do "compulsories" ie: Vernon's Triumph and Cups and Balls and Slydini's coins through the table, and maybe a second dealing, bottom dealing and palming excercise.

AS WRITTEN, NO IMPROVMENTS.

Then "Free Style" whatever you want with originality the highest point getter.

Yes, but the East German judge will keep marking you down, insisting that you've been flashing. :whack:

[Rafael Benatar]

That kind of Olympics does exist in Japan, as I recently learned in an interesting conversation with Shoot Ogawa. Actually, they don't have the faro in it but he was going to suggest it. They have several categories, with judges and everything and awards of, I think, $1000 each. And people strive to break last year's records. They have a Muscle Pass competition (the highest, without lifting the hand off the table) and, among other things, sorting a shuffled deck into new-deck order. I showed Shoot my personal method and then he showed me his and wow, amazing! I can't remember the time but both the method and the speed were ...wow. He also told me of a close-up competition, with cash awards, with a draw, like in a tennis tournament and it's not allowed to repeat material. The problem, Shoot says, is that you tend to keep the best for the finals. Then comes someone who doesn't have a chance to win and throw their best stuff in the first round so they can say they beat so and so. Regarding the question of whether this is useful, well... I bet it is. The one thing I'm sure of is, it can't hurt. I personally find it fascinating, even if only for its own sake. An interesting subject for a Genii report.

[Guest]

Of all magic I have seen in my life there is only a few times I have seen a magician use a perfect faro "live". Is it to hard to execute or?
I think its very useful. There are so many miracles you can do with a faro shuffle that I think its one of the best card "moves" to master fully.

R.Paul Wilson showed me "ONE HANDED FARO" a month ago. How many magicins can do that? Not many I belive. This was my first time I witnessed a one-handed faro shuffle live, woow.
Wilson may put his one handed faro on a DVD in the future.

Can someone recommend me some books with card effects for faro shuffle?

Mats G. Kjellstrom
www.mastermagic.info

[Guest]

The perfect faro is one of those things that once you get it, you can do it pretty easily...getting it can be a problem. It is very handy for getting a stack set up the way you want it. The memorized deck stack I like, which some day I'll actually remember, has different effects that can be set up by doing one, two, or three faro's.

Paul Gertners Unshuffled (is that correct?) is reason enough to learn to do a faro.
Steve V

[Michael Close]

I grabbed a deck that had been broken in, put it in new deck order, and ran through three sets of 8 perfect out faros. My times were between 40-45 seconds.

This, of course, means absolutely nothing.

The key to using the faro in the real world is causualness, not speed. If there is no fumbling with the cut, if the weave is done in a manner that seems unimportant, and if the process is followed by a gentle bridging of the cards, no layman pays any attention to the shuffle. As I have written before, the only heat comes when it looks like you are trying to push the molecules of two bricks together.

There are ways to increase your speed, if that is your goal. They mostly have to do with eliminating excess actions. I discuss these on my Faro CD.

Now here's the sad news. I don't use the faro as much as I used to. And I used to use it a lot. The problem is that in dim lighting I can no take a casual glance at the deck to make sure that the faro is perfect. My eyes are not as good as they used to be. (Like the joke with the guy with the walnut and the coconut.) Getting old is a bitch.

M. Close

[Guest]

Bob Walker and I once staged a contest to see who could put a shuffled deck into Si Stebbins order.
Doing this from a New Deck is a piece of cake, using the Russduck-Marlo-Ortiz method. I once did it in 38 seconds.

Unfortunately, nobody cared...
not even Walker...

[Guest]

Michael, I've seen you do the Faro, and well, I was impressed with how casual you made it look.

That aside, I'm only 42. I've had to wear glasses since I was kid. But only this year have I finally had to break down and buy a set of "indoor" glasses to go with my regular glasses. I can now finally read menus in dim light again, and the lettering on my (non-digital) [censored] day/date calendar. You may want to look into a pair of indoor glasses. I can't see why they couldn't fix you up with a decent pair. In my case, my eyesight is so bad without glasses that my own hand is blurry at arms length, and I have a heavy astigmatism. My glasses are actually good enough to allow me to drive as well, but they are optimized for close rather than far sight, while my outdor glasses are optimized for longer distance. I can use either interchangebly except when it comes to reading.

Also, I didn't know this but in the darkness our depth of field gets worse, so make sure you have the glasses optimzed for dim light use if you order some.

Good glasses aren't cheap, but they are worth it IMHO.

[Guest]

Kjellstrom wrote:

Can someone recommend me some books with card effects for faro shuffle?

Steve V already recommended Lorayne's Best of friends vol. 1 where you can find 'unshuffled' and some more faro effects.

Marlo's 'The faro shuffle' and 'faro notes' are probably the first place you could look for faro information. I think both are included in a recent book, Revolutionary Card Technique.

I would suggest you take a look at Lorayne's Apocalypse Magazine (or the bound edition comprising 4 books) where you can find lots of tricks with Faro Shuffles included right off my mind 'The faro knows', 'the faro and the princess' and some others.

You can also try Alex Elmsley books (esp. book 2) with some faro tricks, including stay stack.

Roy Walton's The Complete Walton also has some effects with the faro.

And most recently Ortiz's Scams and Fantasies where you can find many faro tricks right from the start. Deja Vu Poker and Combination Cull are really 'easy' if you can faro not necessarily fast if we are to keep with the topic at hand.

Hope this information helps.

luigimar

[Pete Biro]

Alex Elmsley used to sandpaper the cards to sharpen the edges so he could faro better/faster. :p

[Pete Biro]

Some years back I was running the Rubicon Trail (an off-road Jeep run on roads that do not exist, over rocks, across aligator infested rivers, mosquito infested swamps... you name it -- OK I am stretching the truth a bit - ) anyway, we came to a clearing where there were rescue people, nurses, mechanics etc. and there was a gal standing alongside the road doing faro after faro after faro.

We pulled over to take a break and I went over to chat with here thinking she was into card magic.

Wrong.

She had no idea what she was doing. She said she just picked up some cards one day and started to weave the cards to pass the time.

:rolleyes:

[Pete Biro]

Off topic, but...

On that same trip we needed a hotel one night and there wasn't a room available for 100 miles in any direction.

We went into a B&B and they were booked but we told them we were desperate.

So, for $20 bucks they let us climb up into the attic and sleep (there were a couple of old mattresses up there in storage).

Hey, when there's a will there's a way. :D

[Guest]

A better description of "Unshuffled" can be found in Gertner's Steel and Silver . As a matter of fact I remember the write up in Best of Friends Vol I. as being slightly different from the version Gertner now uses.

But enough of that, let's hear the joke with the guy with the walnut and the coconut!

Frank Yuen

[Guest]

I suppose many of you are right in the aspect of not needing to be able to do 8 out faros quickly. One minute is surely a long time to wait if you are watching someone 'shuffle' a deck of cards.

The aim of the exercise is to be able to do the Faros quickly and efficiently, enough so that they appear casual. What is also important is to be able to switch between In and Out faros whenever you need to. At some point, the time factor became an 'obsession' for me!

Those who have about 10 minutes on their hands, take out the deck prepared for UNSHUFFLED and do the 52 IN faros required to restore the deck. You get some pretty patterns forming as you watch the black marks on the side of the deck. One thing I noted was sometimes the value of the bottom card of the deck after an In faro corresponded with the number of times you would see the word Unshuffled. This does not happen all the time, though; it happened enough times for me to notice it! It is probably just a coincidence that this happens. :confused:

If you get tired after 26 IN faros, you can simply reverse the order of the cards to get it into new deck order. I won't spoil the fun by saying what you should see at 26 IN faros. :D

thanks for the responses,
hai.

[Guest]

First, I can't/don't do Faros. Now that that's aside..

Hai, is it not the case that the objective is to deliver some patter, introduce yourself, etc., while doing the faros? It's been well over a year since I last saw Michael Close perform in Las Vegas (perhaps closer to 2 years), but I seem to recall him wandering up and introducing himself while he shuffled. Afer he shuffled a couple times, anyone would figure the cards were well mixed and thus be amazed by the first Faro-based trick unleashed. Thus there was no "waiting" while he shuffled, and there was no explicit 'here let me shuffle up these cars so we know there can be no funny business' schtick. They had been shuffled during the intro so the assumption was they were mixed.

[Guest]

I think, like me, H_Ho is just interested in this kind of thing for the sheer sake of it ... yea yea i know too much time on our hands :D

[Guest]

Originally posted by Kjellstrom:
Of all magic I have seen in my life there is only a few times I have seen a magician use a perfect faro "live". Is it to hard to execute or?
I think its very useful. There are so many miracles you can do with a faro shuffle that I think its one of the best card "moves" to master fully.

R.Paul Wilson showed me "ONE HANDED FARO" a month ago. How many magicins can do that? Not many I belive. This was my first time I witnessed a one-handed faro shuffle live, woow.
Wilson may put his one handed faro on a DVD in the future.

Can someone recommend me some books with card effects for faro shuffle?

Mats G. Kjellstrom
www.mastermagic.info

I agree that not too many people use the faro shuffle. It's too bad since there are some real impossible miracles one can pull off using this shuffle.

As far as books go, Juan Tamariz, Darwin Ortiz, Alex Elmsley and Ed Marlo all have effects in print that use the faro shuffle that are worth investigation and study.

In addition to R. Paul Wilson performing the faro with one hand, I have also seen Rene Lavand and Darwin Ortiz perform a perfect faro with one hand as well.

I can do 8 faros in under a minute as well. I haven't timed myself but I am fairly certain I can do it in under 45 seconds. (I do 8 face down faros and then 8 face up faros every single time I open a deck of cards and I usually break them in very quickly). This is from performing the sleight for over 10 years - by the way, speed was never a factor when performing it.

[Guest]

One of my favourites applications for a faro shuffle is Ed Marlos: The Chain Calculator: "Cardician shuffles the deck, yet after each shuffle he is able to tell the location of any card called for"
To do this yo only need to use a a memo stack (i use Joyal Stack) plus to do a perfect Faro Out Shuffles plus a formula.

Can someone describe the effect for Unshuffled?

TIP:
Allan Ackermanns video is a great source for faro students: A-1 Magicalmedia - A. Ackermanns Advanced Card Control Video Series, Vol. Six . The Faro Shuffle.

Pit Hartling uses the Faro in his new book "Card Fictions" or in his lecture notes!

www.card-fictions.com

[Guest]

Kjellstrom,

Watch this video for a demo of Unshuffled...

http://www.gertner.com/trade.html