Sådan blev jeg meget bedre til at blande kort

Before 2015, I decided to learn 12 new things during the new year. A new thing every month.

The first thing I threw myself over was to learn how to mix cards, since I’ve always been an idiot to mix short and slightly impressed with people who can merge the cards with a few quick moves.

Focus on efficiency and performance

Since I love efficiency and performance, I of course put a strategy on how to learn how to mix cards.

Specifically, I decided in advance to do the following for each of the 12 new things to learn in 2015:

• I have a calendar month to learn every new thing, eg. January 2015 to learn how to mix cards.
• In each month I dedicate 10 min. during the day to learn the new thing, whereby I have a total of approx. 5 hours (300 minutes) to learn the new thing.
• Before I get started, I need to read about how to learn the new thing, and plan for how I want to grasp things.
• One or more success criteria must also be defined, ie. goals for what to achieve during the set calendar month.

That’s how I made a plan

To learn how to mix cards, I read some different articles on the web about learning how to mix cards. The best article I could find was this one that reviews 6 techniques with videos, step by step descriptions and insider tips.

From this article I put my plan where I would address each of the six techniques one by one. Ie that I would start with overhand shuffle – and then I could make a decent version of this technique, then I would proceed to the next technique, etc.

The success criteria for mixing cards was therefore that I was able to make a decent version of all 6 techniques. Ie That was the goal of my learning in January.

Time spent, techniques and experiments

While writing this, we are in mid-February, so I have completed my attempt to learn how to mix cards. How it went exactly, I come to, since we first have to have a schedule of how much time I spent on the different techniques:

Date	Activity
1.1	Overhand shuffle
2.1	Overhand shuffle + Hindu shuffle
3.1	Hindu shuffle
4.1	Hindu shuffle
5.1	Hindu shuffle + Weave shuffle
6.1	Weave shuffle
7.1	Weave shuffle
8.1	Weave shuffle
9.1	Sweetheart shuffle *
1.10	Sweetheart shuffle + Weave shuffle
1.11	Rifle shuffle
1.12	Rifle shuffle
1.13	Rifle shuffle
1.14	Rifle Shuffle + Table Rifle Shuffle
1.15	Table Rifle Shuffle + Strip Shuffle
1.16	Overhand Shuffle + Hindu Shuffle
1.17	Weave Shuffle + Rifle Shuffle
1.18	experiments **
1.19	Overhand shuffle, focus on speed
1.20	Overhand shuffle, focus on speed
1.21	Overhand shuffle, focus on speed
1.22	Overhand shuffle, focus on speed
1.23	Overhand shuffle + experiments
1.24	experiments
1.25	experiments
1.26	experiments
1.27	experiments
1.28	experiments
1.29	experiments
1.30	experiments
1.31	experiments

The worst thing was to make rifle shuffle, because it had to be made in the hands opposite the rifle shuffle that people usually make on the table (it did not come later in my plane, under the name of table rifle shuffle).

*) My boyfriend turned out to be able to some card tricks, so I spent some time trying to copy her trick.

**) The last 9 days of the month went with experiments where I tried to combine the different techniques and to make the cards fly between hands (just as there is always a game shark doing it in Lucky Luke).

That’s how it went

As the last 9 days went on with experiments, it hardly comes as any surprise that my plan was completed and managed to make decent versions of all 6 techniques.

There is no doubt that I have become much better and faster to mix shortly than before, which comes as no surprise when considering the starting point.

When I make simple techniques such as. table rifle shuffle, so I think there is control over my technique. But the harder techniques like rifle shuffle in the hands and weave shuffle I still do not seem to run super beautiful, fast and elegant.

Occasionally, I succeeded in getting the cards to fly between my hands in the best Lucky Luke style, but so often the last 9 days of experiments ended up making the classic card on the floor trick …

Difficulty:
– quite easy to learn

Result:
– much better than before, but not perfect.