36. How to Make a Marked Deck
class: gimmick | impressiveness: 5/5 | factors: major pre-work, practice required | requires: sharpie marker, deck of bicycle cards | watch full episode
There’s a million ways to make a marked deck of cards, but here’s a quick and easy method that we taught on Scam School: you’ll need a red-backed deck of rider-back Bicycle cards, a red sharpie marker, and about 30 minutes of your time.
This is going to be tedious, but oh, man will it be worth it… You’ll have an advantage in every game of cards you ever play again. If a card trick goes awry, you’ll always be able to save it by knowing what card they took. This is the swiss-army knife of card gimmicks.
If you ever suspect you’re playing with a marked deck, there’s an easy way to check: square up all the cards and riffle through them as if they’re a flip book. In a marked deck, you’ll see a wild scattershot of tiny imperfections and markings jumping all over the back of the cards.
I’ve heard this called “going to the movies” by gamblers:
Watch Demonstration (External link)
Take a look at the upper right hand corner of the back design.
We’re going to encode the value of the card into the small pinwheel, and we’ll encode the suit into the ocean-wave-looking dots just below and to the right.
With your red sharpie marker, you’ll find that a single dot over any one of those petals makes them totally vanish, and it’s surprisingly hard to notice. As you go through the deck, also remember that you’ll need to mark both ends of each card. Each time you finish one corner, rotate the card 180 degrees and start again, making the same marks on the other side.
Let’s start with the pinwheel: if the card is an ace, we’ll leave the pinwheel totally unmarked.
For the numbers 2 through 10, we’ll place marks moving clockwise around the pinwheel, starting with 2 at the top and ending with the center dot being 10.
Finally, for the jack, queen, and king, we’ll place two marks: marking both the center dot and top petal will be “jack,” marking both the center and the second petal will be “queen,” and marking both the center and the third petal is “king.”
Now the ocean wave: the first four triangles are going to be our code for the suit. You can pick any order for the suits, but I like arranging them as “clubs,” “hearts,” “spades,” and “diamonds.” This is an easy one to remember because they’re in CHSD, or “CHaSeD” order, as magicians call it.
If you’re worried about remembering this code, don’t be. The good news is that the very act of spending 30 minutes making this deck means that by the time you’re done, you’ve practiced enough that the translation will be totally automatic. Keep in mind also that there’s a good chance you’ll mess up at least one card as you mark them, so have a second deck handy. When you mess up, just swap out your bad card for a clean one.
…oh and by the way, did you end up figuring out the example card at the beginning of the chapter? (If you picked the 10 of diamonds, a winner is you!)