

Smooshing is used in poker tournaments and in baccarat games in Monte Carlo, but no one actually knows how long you need to smoosh a deck to randomize it. This toddler-level technique involves spreading the cards out on a table, swishing them around with your hands, and then gathering them up. Over the years, Diaconis and his students and colleagues have successfully analyzed the effectiveness of almost every type of shuffle people use in ordinary life. In 1992, Diaconis famously proved - along with the mathematician Dave Bayer of Columbia University - that it takes about seven ordinary riffle shuffles to randomize a deck. “We all have our own basic images that we translate things into, and for me cards were where I started.” This makes them “friendly,” said Diaconis, whose speech still carries the inflections of his native New York City. He has also analyzed Bose-Einstein condensation - in which a collection of ultra-cold atoms coalesces into a single “superatom” - by envisioning the atoms as rows of cards moving around. Once, for example, he helped decode messages passed between inmates at a California state prison by using small random “shuffles” to gradually improve a decryption key. Now a professor of mathematics and statistics at Stanford University, Diaconis has employed his intuition about cards, which he calls “the poetry of magic,” in a wide range of settings.

A few years later he was admitted to Harvard University’s graduate statistics program on the strength of a recommendation letter from the famed mathematics writer Martin Gardner that said, more or less, “This kid invented two of the best ten card tricks in the last decade, so you should give him a chance.”
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At 24, he started taking college classes to try to learn how to calculate the probabilities behind various gambling games. But unlike most magicians, Diaconis eventually found his way into academia, lured by an even more powerful siren song: mathematics.
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He swiveled the four-card pile in his hands - always keeping it in the same flat plane - and sometimes the aces were faceup, sometimes facedown, even though they couldn’t possibly have flipped over.ĭiaconis’ career as a professional magician began more than five decades ago, when he ran away from home at age 14 to go on the road with the sleight-of-hand virtuoso Dai Vernon. “Of course, it’s easy to get confused when there are a lot of cards, so let me just take four,” he said, scooping up the aces. In an empty conference room at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Antonio, Texas, this January, he casually tossed the cards into four piles in a seemingly random motion - yet when he checked, each pile magically had an ace on top. “I’m not going to give you the chance,” he retorted. In most cases, you’ll not need anything more than a deck of playing cards, and some time to practice.Persi Diaconis shuffled and cut the deck of cards I’d brought for him, while I promised not to reveal his secrets. The video below will teach you some of the best card magic tricks for beginners I know. The fact that the trick is easy does not mean that it’s less effective than an advanced trick – I know many professional magicians that have a lot of easy tricks in their repertoire. What I love about card magic is that you can have just one little deck of playing cards with you, in your pocket, and you can perform hundreds of magic tricks and amaze people. Thousands of card magic tricks were invented over the decades and many of them are suitable for beginners. If you’re just starting with magic, there is no better start than card tricks.

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