My work with numbers, and specifically creating complex images (pp.96–9), led the way for me to further hone my skills at memorizing cards. When I started doing this, I was trying to beat Creighton Carvello’s record for a single deck. As I mentioned earlier, I soon realized that I had within my grasp the ability to memorize multiple decks. Later on, I realized that I could make that goal more realistic if I could translate the method I was using to memorize long sequences of numbers into an approach or strategy I could use for multiple decks of cards.
You already know the basics of memorizing playing cards (see pp.43–62). I always encourage people to learn a new skill by taking things one step at a time to prevent failure. So, I suggest you feel really confident with placing one card at one stop on a journey and with the Dominic System before you try the technique in this chapter. To make this new variation easier once you do begin, though, I’ve broken it down into small steps so that you have a run of successes – rather than trying to do too much too soon and becoming frustrated. I want you to experiment with a few cards to begin with, just to satisfy yourself that the principle works. If you’re successful with a handful of playing cards, this will give you the impetus and the confidence to use it to try to memorize more, and then eventually a whole deck and even perhaps more than one deck.
You’ll need a deck of cards. The first thing you must do with it is pull out the court cards (the Jacks, Queens and Kings) and then arrange them according to suit (Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts and Spades).
Now it’s time to bring into play some of the principles you’ve already learned. At the beginning of the book I said that I associate every card in the deck with a character, and that some of the characters come to me in a flash. Well, one logical way in which I assign characters is to ensure that the suit itself, linked with the value of the specific card, provides a clear and logical connection to the character. Try it. Perhaps the Queen of Diamonds is Queen Elizabeth II of England; and the Queen of Hearts, your wife or girlfriend (or the King of Hearts, your husband or boyfriend). In other words, Diamonds might give characters who are wealthy, while Hearts could be those you love or admire.
Having assigned your characters, you need to integrate one of the elements of the Dominic System. Each of your characters needs a prop, feature or action. So, for example, if Bill Gates is your King of Diamonds, picture him counting bundles of cash or sitting at his laptop checking his latest bank statement. The prop, feature or action animates your characters. In time, it will also help you to memorize longer lists of cards, because you can turn each card into a complex image, just as I do with the long sequences of numbers.
Place the pile of court cards face down in front of you. One by one, turn over each court card. Each time you turn up a new card, look at it, make a character association, give the character an action, and turn the next card. Keep doing this until all the court cards have a character and action and then review the choices you’ve made, altering them as necessary, until you’re happy with the associations and they’re firmly embedded in your memory.
Once the cast list for your court cards comes naturally to you, you’re ready to shuffle them (still keeping them separate from the rest of the deck) and then memorize them in the new random order. You’ll need a 12-stage journey for this. Use one from your journey bank, or invent a new journey. As I’ve said before, I have journeys that I keep for memorizing cards and numbers (while others work better for names and faces and words; see p.73).
Run through your route a couple of times to familiarize yourself with the stops. Place the pile of shuffled court cards face down in front of you. Turn over the first card. With good preparation, you should instantly recognize it as the character you’ve given it, and all you need to do is to place that character, including his or her prop, feature or action, at the first stop on your journey.
Let’s say the first card you turn over is the King of Hearts and you’ve given that card the character of your father, and let’s say he’s a keen tennis player (which gives him his action). If the first stage of your journey is your front gate, you would imagine your dad at your gate practising his serve – perhaps he’s serving over the gate into the road, and you flinch as he narrowly misses the cars! If the next card is the Queen of Diamonds and you’ve given her the character of Queen Elizabeth II (with the action of knighting someone), you would place her at the second stop in your journey (perhaps your front door). She’s motioning to you to kneel as you approach her so that she can knight you.
Spend as long as you need walking through your journey and placing the 12 court cards at the 12 stops. Your aim is to accustom your mind to the conversion process, while also allowing your imagination free rein to bring the cards to life. Your brain is having to do several things at once – see a card, convert it to a character, place the character in the journey, and memorize it. Remember to use emotion and all your senses and to try to make the connections logical so that you aren’t asking your brain to work harder than it needs to. Go through the whole 12-card stack again, if you like, and then once you think you have it memorized, review it in your mind without looking at the cards. Then, again without looking at the cards, write down the sequence of cards.
How did you do? Don’t be hard on yourself if you made a few mistakes – although do try to work out where you went wrong. If some of the associations weren’t strong enough, perhaps it would be better to substitute other characters or actions for those cards. Remember, practice makes perfect – so shuffle the deck and do the whole exercise again until you make no errors at all.
Once you’ve mastered the 12 court cards, it’s showtime! You can now move toward memorizing a complete deck of 52. First, you need to lay the groundwork. Just as you gave a character to each of the court cards, you need to attach a character and a prop, feature or action to the remaining 40 cards in the deck. It sounds laborious, but once it’s done, and you use your cast list to memorize cards as they are turned over, you’ll have one of the greatest practice tools for your memory at your fingertips.
If you managed to code the 100 permutations of digits for the Dominic System (see p.92), coding your 40 remaining cards will seem like child’s play. Begin by picking out cards that somehow remind you of someone. Perhaps the Ace of Spades is your boss, or a teacher you particularly admired. One of my students uses a whole British pop group – S Club 7 – for the 7 Clubs! I like to use James Bond for the 7 Diamonds – he is agent number 007 and he was the starring character in the movie Diamonds are Forever. Once you’ve been through the remaining 40 cards, finding those with specific character significance, you can code the rest of the cards using a slight adaptation of the Dominic System.
Instead of coding pairs of numbers into pairs of letters that then translate to names, you can use the Dominic System to translate the card value into one letter and then use the initial letter of the suit to give the second letter. For example, the 2 Spades becomes B (2) S (Spades) and the 8 Hearts becomes HH. Unless you’ve already given specific associations unrelated to the Dominic System, the Ace of any suit takes A and the ten of any suit takes O. Turn through the remaining cards in the deck, working out the letter pairs. Make a list on a sheet of paper (just as you did for the numbers), writing the pairs of letters down the left-hand column. In the next column spell out the character name for each card. For me BS translates to Bram Stoker (the author of Dracula), while HH is the wrestler Hulk Hogan, but could equally well be Harry Houdini or Hermann Hesse. Of course, you don’t always have to use famous people – if you know someone called Helen Harris, she would work, too. In the next column give each character an action, feature or prop, just as you did on page 94.
The temptation once you’ve spent lots of time working out your characters is to set about learning them all straightaway. However, you want to make the codes you’ve formed stick, so I suggest you adopt a slow, careful learning process that enables you to embed the codes firmly in your mind. Aim to learn ten cards and their characters and actions every day for four days (you already know the 12 court cards). On the fifth day, review the lot – from memory if you can – simply by turning over the cards one at a time and saying to yourself that character’s name and prop, feature or action. Include the court cards in your review process, too.
If you like, you can adopt a more formalized approach and review according to the principles of the Rule of Five. Every day learn your ten new characters, but also every day make a review of those characters and any you’ve learned on previous days (again, including the court cards). In this way, by the time you come to your full review on day five, all the characters should be making their way into your long-term memory. If you can do more reviews than this (perhaps in the morning and evening, each day), all the better. Once you’re confident that you know your cards inside out, you’re ready to do the exercise on the opposite page. Try it, and be confident with it, before you move on to the advanced system for card memorization described below.
It’s hugely important for your self-confidence to have lots of small successes that build up to one big success. So, in this exercise, you’re going to use the basic system to memorize half a deck of cards. Only once you’re confident should you try the full deck.
1 Choose a journey of 26 stages that you’re completely familiar with – you don’t want to have to work to recall the stages when you’re trying to memorize the cards. Once your route is ready, count out 26 of the 52 cards (half the deck) and shuffle them, then place them face down in front of you. Turn over the top card and put it down next to the stack. Connect that card’s character and prop, feature or action with the first stop on your journey. When you’re ready, turn up the next card, and connect that one to the second stage. Continue turning and mentally placing cards until you’ve revealed all the cards in the stack.
2 Do a mental review of the journey. The system should allow for good retention, so you shouldn’t need to review before you’ve memorized all 26 cards. As you review, don’t refer back to the cards themselves: simply walk through your journey, recalling each card to yourself. Then, for your “official” recall, write down each card in sequence on a sheet of paper. Refer back to the deck of 26 cards to assess how well you did. A score of 10–16 cards in order is very good; 17 or more is excellent. Once you can confidently memorize all 26, try step 3.
3 Now repeat the memorization in steps 1 and 2, but for the whole deck (for this you’ll need a route of 52 stages). Once you’re confident at that, you can try the advanced system (see opposite).
To memorize four digits at a time, you used “complex images” – you combined one character with the prop, feature or action of another (see pp.96–9). You can use the same principle for memorizing cards, and then you need only a 26-stage journey to memorize a whole deck; which means that you can use your 52-stage journey for two decks. This is how it works.
Imagine that the first two cards you turned up in the deck were the 6 Clubs (SC) and the 5 Spades (ES). Let’s say that your character for SC is Simon Cowell and his action is pressing the buzzer to register his displeasure at an act on one of his talent shows; while ES gives you the former boxer and famous US talk-show host Ed Sullivan, whose action (naturally) is boxing. At the first stage of the journey, instead of just placing Simon Cowell with his own action (which would represent one card), you’d place Simon Cowell boxing, in this way combining the two cards at one stage. For example, let’s say the first stage of your journey is your front door. You might imagine Simon Cowell in boxing gloves pummelling the closed door as if trying to punch his way in. If you pair up the remaining cards in the deck in the same way and place each pair at a stage on your journey, you’ll need only 26 stages to memorize all 52 cards.
Once I’d developed my advanced system and become proficient at it so that I could memorize multiple decks of cards with relative ease, I could not only win memory competitions and amaze audiences, I also became a card sharp. For a while I made a living playing the casino game blackjack – I used my powerful memory to gain an edge over the casinos, gambled accordingly, and won good money. Unsurprisingly, I was also eventually banned from casinos on both sides of the Atlantic!
Of course, not everyone will want to hone their card-memorizing skills to become a professional blackjack player, but the system is just as applicable to household games such as whist or bridge. In whist, for example, four players are each dealt 13 cards from a shuffled deck. The object of the game is to win tricks: the highest trump laid in a round wins the trick; or if no player lays a trump, the highest card of the leading suit takes the trick. Let’s say you want to memorize the following typical round of cards played in a four-handed game. The four players (column 1, below) lay the following cards (column 2). The third and fourth columns represent my character codes for those cards.
| PLAYER 1 | 3 Clubs | CC | Charlie Chaplin |
| PLAYER 2 | 4 Clubs | DC | David Copperfield |
| PLAYER 3 | 8 Clubs | HC | Hillary Clinton |
| PLAYER 4 | Ace Clubs | AC | Al Capone |
There are a number of ways to approach how you memorize the round, depending on the level of help you feel you need.
First, if you just want to know that these cards have left the deck, try imagining throwing a bucket of water over each of the card characters. I imagine the reaction of each person as they receive a good drenching: Charlie Chaplin’s sad face; a rueful expression from David Copperfield; Hillary Clinton shocked and dismayed; and Al Capone giving me an angry, threatening look! Once you have “seen” these actions in your mind, you’ll be able to work out whether or not a certain card is still to play, simply by recalling whether or not that character has had a drenching yet.
A more precise method is to use a prepared 26-stage route to memorize the sequence as the cards are played. Using the system of complex images to memorize two cards at a time (one as a character, the other as a prop, feature or action), at the first stage of the journey I picture Charlie Chaplin pulling a rabbit out of a hat (Chaplin is using the action of the magician David Copperfield). At the second stage, I picture Hillary Clinton spraying bullets from a machine gun (Al Capone’s action). Once the second round is played, I place that set of four cards at the next two stages of my journey, and so on until all the cards have been played.
Finally, if you feel really confident with the system, you could allocate one journey for each player and memorize which cards have been played by each person. You need four routes of 13 stages. Player 1, to your left, could be a route around a park, player 2’s route could be through a shopping mall, and so on. When player 1 lays down the 3 Clubs, you picture Charlie Chaplin at, say, the park gate (the first stage); when player 2 plays the 4 Clubs, you imagine David Copperfield doing magic at the entrance of the shopping mall; and so on.