+ Show Spoiler +
It's been a damn long time since I've made a post on Teamliquid. After I stopped playing Broodwar, it seemed silly to keep posting here. Regardless, I've frequented this website for almost 3 years now, and I think it's time I did my best to give you all something you'll love, (at least I hope).
Important:
Yes, this is a guide for exactly what the title says. Hopefully this will answer the next few questions that pop into your head:
-Yes, any regular deck, any order, no silly little tricks
-No, you won't be memorizing some rhyme or mnemonic
-No, it doesn't take a great memory. Mine sucks, although it's gotten better since I've done this trick.
-Yes, you will actually be able to recite each card of the deck, in order, backwards or forwards, be able to tell someone what the 18th card is, and more.
-Yes, it is absolutely possible to recite a deck of cards as such. Dave Farrow recited 52 ecks* in order.
-Yes, Just like most other things, you will need to put a decent number of hours in to become good at this.
I hope that clarifies things a bit. If you are curious about how much time it would take to be able to memorize the deck at a decent speed, don't be alarmed. As you'll see, it's not that part which takes a huge amount of time but the preliminaries, at least in my case.
Here's the basic steps which you will need to complete. I'll explain each one later:
1. Create a list of Peg Characters
2. Create a memory map/memory palace/whatever you feel like calling it
3. Start memorizing/reciting 10-20 cards, then move up
4. Practice memorizing the deck faster
A few more things to note:
The techniques which we will employ are gathered from authors and mentalists such as Dominic O'Brien and Derren Brown, two people whom I very much look up to. You will be using a combination of the Memory Palace or Memory Map method, and a peg system which links people or characters you are familiar with to a specific card. This allows you to indirectly memorize the exact order of a deck, granted that you have 52 unique locations on your memory map, and each card is linked to the appropriate peg. I'll help you out with creating the peg system as well as the memory map later. Please keep in mind that while I've pilfered these techniques from others, I may add in a few things here and there that helped me.
Let's begin:
1. Create a list of peg characters/people
I found this to be the most time consuming task, but thankfully for you I've done most of the hard work. I'll tell you how I made my list, then you can pick and choose from my suggestions if you get stumped.
Here's how to find the people you want:
1 - A
2 - B
3 - C
4 - D
5 - E
6 - S
7 - T
8 - H
9 - N
0 - O
The above is a labeling scheme which will help you think of people. The next step is pretty obvious
D - Diamonds
C - Clubs
S - Spades
H - Hearts
Combining the two, we get the following:
6 of Diamonds = DS
10 of Hearts = HO (teehee)
Yes, it's that simple. Here's where you've got to start writing things down. On a piece of paper or in notepad, make a list of each card in the deck separated by suit. You can include face cards, but I'll talk about them later. It should look something like:
H1
H2
H3
...
D1
D2
D3
... etc.
Once you've got your list down, it's time to start populating it. Let's start with the Ace of Hearts. When you translate the card into it's initials, you get HA (the A comes from 1 - A). Who's the first person that you can think of, fictitious or otherwise, associated with HA? Perhaps it's someone with the initials H.A., or perhaps you're like me and you instantly pictured Nelson from the Simpsons, with his trade mark laugh. Either way, what sticks in your mind is what's important.
Now the fun part. Do that for every card. Sometimes the letters form a sound like the above example, or sometimes they form initials. Either way, this can become a very time consuming process, so be prepared to spend a while on it. Believe me, it's worth it in the end.
To speed along the process, here's a list of suggestions. Some will be blank since they will be personal to me, or too obscure for most to understand
H1 Nelson (simpsons)
H2 Obscure
H3 Jesus (Holy Christ!)
H4 Obscure
H5 Herman Li (It doesn't have to be exact initials, so I went with H.E., for Herman)
H6 Howard Stern
H7 High Templar
H8 Hulk Hogan
H9 Obscure
H10 (perhaps a very friendly and open male or female you know of, or perhaps paris hilton.)
S1 Personal
S2 Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO)
S3 Steve Carell
S4 Seline Dion (Yes, I know it's spelled Celine. If all else fails use this)
S5 obscure
S6 Sarah Silverman (This one is lame, since I'm not a fan of her.)
S7 Steven Tyler (Aerosmith)
S8 Stephen Hawking (Naturally)
S9 Steve Nash (Basketball player)
S10 Obscure
D1 Dalai Lama (I say Dalai Lama, but I picture Gandhi from Clone high. as long as I make that association, it still works fine.)
D2 Derren Brown (mentalist), Doyle Brunson (for poker fans)
D3 Don Cherry (More of a Canadian thing.)
D4 Danny Devito (Angry short man)
D5 Obscure (This one is really damn hard, as far as I was concerned)
D6 David Spade (funny man)
D7 Dark Templar
D8 David hasslehoff
D9 Day Nine (Duh), Daniel Negreanu (Poker Pro)
D10 Homer Simpson (comes from DO, Doh)
C1 Chris Angel (I don't like him, but his antics work well for memory)
C2 Chris Berman (football dude, funny voice)
C3 Charlie Chaplain (the comedy guy with the hitler stash)
C4 Cameron Diaz (I had a lot of trouble with this one as well, but she works fine)
C5 Clint Eastwood (badass)
C6 Charlie Sheen (this one got easier to remember as of late, I wonder why?)
C7 Chris Tucker (Black guy with the high voice)
C8 Chris Hansen (Would you take a seat over there?)
C9 Chuck Norris (Yeah)
C10 Colon Powell (Another tough one. Military General)
Now comes the face cards. The face cards aren't particularly difficult, if you follow the scheme presented by Dominic O'brien. For each suit, pick a theme for the face cards. The schemem I use is: Diamonds - Rich people, Hearts - Sex symbols or people with lots of 'heart', Clubs - Voilent people, Spades - people with black hair. For example, my king of diamonds is Bill Gates, and my Queen of clubs is a friend of mine who happens to be a small yet violent korean girl. Be creative, and try to use what comes to mind first.
We're almost done the first step, but there is one last piece of the puzzle. Once your list is completely populated, you'll need to create an action appropriate for each card peg. For example, Chuck Norris' action is roundhouse kicking someone/something, Day9's action is the trumpet dance, and Howard stern blows fire out of his asshole. This is a very important step, so don't skip it.
How to practice: I don't expect you to memorize each card peg within a short period of time, as I didn't. Here's how I practiced memorizing which card is attached to which character. Start with one suit, and sort it out of the deck. Now start going through the cards you have one by one, attempting to guess what the character is for the card. First off, the above system will give you a starting point. Let's say you chose spades, and the first card is the 8 of spades. First, you translate the card into a the two letters. 8 of spades = SH. Thinking for a bit, you should arrive at Stephen Hawking, or whatever you chose. If you get completely stumped, which even happens to me at times, have your list handy. It took me about 5 runs through each suit to have a decent success rate, and when you are confident enough, shuffle the suits together and do this for the whole deck. I'd expect to put in about 1-3 hours to get good at this.
2 - Create a memory palace/map/I just call it a mind map.
Alright, if you've followed the previous steps, then you are now able to associate each card with a "card peg", which makes memorization a breeze in comparison. Now comes the second step.
Think of an area you know quite well. Perhaps a walk/bike ride/drive to work/school, or perhaps your workplace/school. You may also use your house, but keep in mind that this mind map must have 52 unique locations if you wish to remember the entire deck, and if you live in a house like mine, that isn't really an option. The mind map I use for cards is of my high school. I know the layout through and through, and there are more than enough unique locations for each card peg to reside. Once you have an area in mind, I recommend grabbing a piece of paper, and making a rough diagram (very rough is fine, you just need the dimensions really) of the area. Place little markers for each of the locations on the diagram. This helps to make your route more concrete in your head. NOTE!!!!!: You must always travel through this area in the same pattern every time. This is how you retain the order of the cards.
This is another pretty big step. If you wish, start with a smaller number of locations in the area for practice. I started with about 10, and moved up in tens from there. It took quite a while before I had the my route set up with exactly 52 locations.
Here's another thing to note. A school is by far one of the best choices, as remembering which card peg is where becomes far easier when they can interact with the location. By using a school full of teachers you know, even to a small degree, allows the card peg to interact with that teacher/person. For example, in one of my locations there is a teacher who is very spiteful and sarcastic, and acts as such towards whatever card peg I place in his room at the time. Interaction is very important.
3 - Combining the steps;memorizing the deck
You've made your card pegs, and you have your mind map set up. Now you can finally test out your memory capabilities. I'll start you off with the steps I go through for memorizing a deck, or even just a few cards. Note: Dominic O'Brien recommends going through your mind map and imagining it completely devoid of any pegs before starting on the deck, to sort of refresh it from prior attempts. I don't really do this, but try it and see if it helps.
Alright, I've shuffled the deck, and I reach for the first card. I'm actually doing this right now btw. I see the 2 of clubs, which translates to CB, or Chris Berman. Chris Berman is a football announcer, who was made internet famous by having a meltdown on his show. As you can probably guess, his action is freaking out. My first location happens to be my homeroom, which also happens to be a computer lab. After I've deduced that it's Chris Berman, I imagine him freaking out at my homeroom teacher. Interaction is the key, so have them banter back and forth, and involve the location with the card peg. Unfortunately this is where long hours of practice come in handy. At this point, it takes me anywhere from 5-20 seconds to imagine this little event taking place. This means that it can take me over 10 minutes to memorize a deck of cards, but fear not. Dominic can apparently do this in less than a second at times. His record is like 56 seconds for a whole deck or something.
Alright, it's time to move to the next location, where the aforementioned process simply repeats itself until I finished the whole deck. It shouldn't take you a huge amount of time to get an entire deck perfect, which is a plus. Also keep in mind that every time you do this trick it will get easier and faster, and if you stick with it for a while then you should start to reap some of the benefits that I have, including a better memory in general.
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If you've read this far, then I applaud you. If you've completed one or more of the steps I've laid out successfully, then I thank you for making my time well worth it. If one person can succesfully perform this trick by reading my post, then I will be very happy.
To make things further easier, here's a list of tips and tricks you can use:
-Try to involve as many senses as possible with each interaction between the card peg and the location. When I use Howard stern, he's often shooting fire onto the teacher in the room he's in, so I imagine the stench of burning hair and farts.
-Use sex, violence, comedy, entropy, irregularity, or anything else you can think of to make things easier. A number of my card pegs have actions based on exactly these things.
-If you have a lot of trouble with a particular card, consider changing the corresponding peg. Certain people may have obvious actions attributed to them, but these actions need to be vivid and unique. Doyle Brunson sitting in a corner playing hold'em with 10 2 may be alright, but Doyle Brunson with a ridiculously large cowboy hat walking into a classroom filled with people makes for a great scene.
-Take your time when reciting the cards after you've memorized them. 90% of my errors come from trying to go to fast and messing up the translation from the card peg back to the card itself. You want to be quick memorizing the cards, but there isn't such a time factor when reciting them. It actually seems cooler when you take it slow.
-A card peg doesn't necessarily have to follow the formula I mentioned above. My 10 of spades has absolutely no relation to the letters SO, but for some odd reason I don't even need to translate it.
-With enough practice, you won't need to translate any of the cards. I'm not at that point yet though.
Other neat tricks:
I pulled this one out of my ass at one family dinner. I grabbed a deck, shuffled it, threw out 5 cards, then flipped threw the deck paying attention only to the card peg. When I was done, I systematically went threw my list of pegs in my head, and I could quite easily figure out if one of them wasn't a card that I saw when I went threw the deck. I only managed to get 3 of them, but considering the performance was 100% ad lib, I was still happy with the result.
My brother and I (him more so) are into Hold'em, and we thought it would be cool to memorize a deck, then let a round play out, and predict which hand would win, and with what cards. Neither of us have gotten around to attempting this, but it from what I've seen it wouldn't be too difficult, but it would take a lot of thought.
Afterthoughts:
I am no expert on this subject, it's simply a hobby of mine. As such, there may be methods or ways of teaching methods simpler than the ones I have laid out. The reality is the methods I've showed you are exactly how I learned. Unfortunately for me, I didn't have as much guidance as I hope you will have. If you have any questions whatsoever, please ask. I will do my best to help.
To the people who will say "Why would you waste your time with this?": Aside from the benefit of a better memory in general, a certain man by the name of Dave Farrow, who specializes in this type of thing, is apparently able to retain mass quantities of information in short periods of time, and has used this ability to become an expert on a variety of subjects. While I can't verify that his methods are linked to the methods I've shown you, I can with confidence say that an ability of this nature could spawn from a similar method that I've shown you. Once my finals are over, I'll begin working on something of this nature myself.
Thank you TL, for being hands-down the best damn website on the internet (for most things anyway .
P.s. I'll be updating the peg list with the list used in Dominic O'Brien's book later on. It's definately directed more towards an old movie buff or someone from the U.K. (Dominic is English). I'll also get my brother to write out his list, since I think it's full of Poker people.
Update: Unfortunately, I've decided against adding Dominic O'Brien's peg list. This is for three reasons. For starters, although a large majority of the material I wrote about is paraphrased from his works more or less, he didn't invent the principles behind it, whereas his list was created by him. Secondly, as I mentioned before, his list contains a very large number of people who would likely be rather unfamiliar to TL's demographic, and thus quite useless in my opinion. Finally, the ebook with the list on it is apparently on a different hard drive back at my parent's place (I just moved out) so it would be quite irritating to get ahold of, and not really worth my time to bother with.
However, when my brother get's home from work I'll get him to write down his list, and I'll post it here later. His list is largely based on poker players, but it should offer some insights.
Also, for anyone interested, I wrote a small console application when I was taking C++ last year, which functions as a substitue for anyone without a real deck of cards. The program is supposed to ask for the number of cards you want to memorize, display each card one by one, then get you to recite them in order back to the computer. You have to guess correctly to advance to the next card. It's a downright awful program (I'm no programmer), but it gets the job done, and it doesn't seem to have any errors. Feel free to edit it any way you want.
+ Show Spoiler +
#include <iostream>
#include <algorithm>
#include <cassert>
#include <functional>
#include <ctime>
using namespace std;
int a[52];
int cardnum;
void carddisplay(void);
void cardrecite(void);
int main()
{
cout<<"How many cards would you like to recite? (Maximum 52).\n";
bool cont;
do
{
cin>>cardnum;
if (cardnum>52)
{
cout<<"Try again\n";
cont = false;
}
else
cont = true;
}
while (cont==false);
srand(time(0));
int i;
for (i = 0; i < 52; ++i)
a[i] = i;
random_shuffle(&a[0], &a[52]);
carddisplay();
cout<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl<<endl;
cout<<"NOTE: To rectify me writing another 100 lines of code, the cards must be re \nentered into the program in numerical form.\n";
cout<<"Assuming Aces are equal to 1, the values follow the format: \nHearts {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13}";
cout<<"\nDaimonds {14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26}";
cout<<"\nSpades {27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39}";
cout<<"\nClubs {40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52}"<<endl;
cout<<"You will have to guess the correct card before you may proceed.\n";
cardrecite();
cout<<"Congradulations, you have recited the whole deck. gg.\n";
int ppause;
cin>>ppause;
return 0;
}
void carddisplay(void)
{
int x;
int d = cardnum;
for (x=0;x<d;x++)
{
cout<<"The card is "<<endl;
if (a[x]==1)
cout<<"1H\n";
else if (a[x]==2)
cout<<"2H\n";
else if (a[x]==3)
cout<<"3H\n";
else if (a[x]==4)
cout<<"4H\n";
else if (a[x]==5)
cout<<"5H\n";
else if (a[x]==6)
cout<<"6H\n";
else if (a[x]==7)
cout<<"7H\n";
else if (a[x]==8)
cout<<"8H\n";
else if (a[x]==9)
cout<<"9H\n";
else if (a[x]==10)
cout<<"10H\n";
else if (a[x]==11)
cout<<"JH\n";
else if (a[x]==12)
cout<<"QH\n";
else if (a[x]==13)
cout<<"KH\n";
else if (a[x]==14)
cout<<"1D\n";
else if (a[x]==15)
cout<<"2D\n";
else if (a[x]==16)
cout<<"3D\n";
else if (a[x]==17)
cout<<"4D\n";
else if (a[x]==18)
cout<<"5D\n";
else if (a[x]==19)
cout<<"6D\n";
else if (a[x]==20)
cout<<"7D\n";
else if (a[x]==21)
cout<<"8D\n";
else if (a[x]==22)
cout<<"9D\n";
else if (a[x]==23)
cout<<"10D\n";
else if (a[x]==24)
cout<<"JD\n";
else if (a[x]==25)
cout<<"QD\n";
else if (a[x]==26)
cout<<"KD\n";
else if (a[x]==27)
cout<<"1S\n";
else if (a[x]==28)
cout<<"2S\n";
else if (a[x]==29)
cout<<"3S\n";
else if (a[x]==30)
cout<<"4S\n";
else if (a[x]==31)
cout<<"5S\n";
else if (a[x]==32)
cout<<"6S\n";
else if (a[x]==33)
cout<<"7S\n";
else if (a[x]==34)
cout<<"8S\n";
else if (a[x]==35)
cout<<"9S\n";
else if (a[x]==36)
cout<<"10S\n";
else if (a[x]==37)
cout<<"JS\n";
else if (a[x]==38)
cout<<"QS\n";
else if (a[x]==39)
cout<<"KS\n";
else if (a[x]==40)
cout<<"1C\n";
else if (a[x]==41)
cout<<"2C\n";
else if (a[x]==42)
cout<<"3C\n";
else if (a[x]==43)
cout<<"4C\n";
else if (a[x]==44)
cout<<"5C\n";
else if (a[x]==45)
cout<<"6C\n";
else if (a[x]==46)
cout<<"7C\n";
else if (a[x]==47)
cout<<"8C\n";
else if (a[x]==48)
cout<<"9C\n";
else if (a[x]==49)
cout<<"10C\n";
else if (a[x]==50)
cout<<"JC\n";
else if (a[x]==51)
cout<<"QC\n";
else if (a[x]==52)
cout<<"KC\n";
system("PAUSE");
}
return ;
}
void cardrecite(void)
{
bool correct;
int b;
int c;
int f = cardnum;
for (b=0;b<f;b++)
{
do
{
cout<<"What is card #"<<(b+1)<<"?\n";
cin>>c;
if (c==a[b])
correct=true;
else
correct=false;
}
while (correct==false);
}
return ;
}
Unfortunately you'll need to know how to compile from source code, but hopefully that's something you can figure out via google.