Addition - It All Adds Up To A False Cut

Magicians call this positioning of
cards in a deck stacking the deck. But, as your audience might suspect
you’ve been up to something sneaky before the trick starts, that’s where
false shuffles and cuts come into play. It looks like you are fairly mixing
the deck while in fact you do no such thing and the cards are in the same
order at the end as they were at the beginning. Here’s one of the simplest
false cuts. It looks like a real gamblers cut but doesn’t change the order
of cards in the deck at all.


Put your pack on the table. Let’s call this pile A. Now cut off about the
top third from this pile and place these cards to the right. Let’s call this
pile B. Now cut half of what’s left in pile A and place this further to the
right of pile B. We’ll call this pile C.
All that remains is for you to pause, then reassemble the pack. Place pile
B onto pile C, then take this combined pile and place it on the cards in
pile A.
To the audience this looks like a fair series of cuts, but if you try it with a
pack you will discover that the pack is in exactly the same order at the
end as it was in the beginning.


Why? Well, all this false cut does is show that when you first cut the cards
into piles, you put the top third in pile B, the middle third in pile C and
leave the bottom third in pile A. So, going from left to right, your pack is
cut into three piles A (bottom), B (top) and C (middle). When you gather
them back together, you put B on top, then C in the middle and then A at
the bottom – exactly where they came from!
It’s obvious that the order of the cards stays the same, it is just simple
arithmetic, but done in an offhand, casual way while telling the audience
you really are mixing the cards they will believe you. It is enough to
confuse the onlookers, and a useful way to start your tricks too.