ufo tofu
ufo tofu
Just doing some reorganizing and bringing over this mates routine that I previously kept separately on Notion.
So for this one, you have your friend divide a spread of cards into two halves. She takes one half and you the other. Each half is shuffled. Then you both spread to the middle somewhere and separate into two halves again. At the randomly separated locations are a pair of matching cards.
Set up: third card from the top and bottom cards should be mates. You can set up fasdiu via cull, or just do it real quick as you’re looking through the faces.
To start: have your friend hold out her hand. Ask her to say some at some point as you push off the first three cards and drop into her hands, followed by a couple more, then a few more... until she says stop. You’re aiming to give her about half the cards- doesn’t need to be exact.
So now, each half should have the mates at the bottom. She can switch the two halves if she wants. Either way, your cards are in your left hand, and hers in her right.
Tell her to mirror you- and you start first- by pushing off and taking the top few cards into the other hand, then pushing off a few cards on top of those, then pushing off a few more cards on top of the packet, then continuing to push small groups of cards on top until you both get to the last card- which goes on top.
I say something like “take some cards first and push a few more cards on top randomly... then a few more... and more... and keep going until you get to the last card.” I’ll get to the last card first, and I just toss the last card as a single card on top of the now genuinely shuffled half. They’ll follow exactly what you do and secretly control that mate to the top.
You’re now holding the cards in your right hand, and she in her left- still mirroring.
Next, flip the cards face up (in the same hand), and tell her to spread through the cards and separate into two halves at a random spot in the middle. You follow her and separate when she does. You will need to execute pulp friction from your right hand, which is backwards if you learned it normally.
If you don’t know pulp friction, I’ll give you the general idea. But you should track it down and learn it properly from Lee Asher. Basically: pinky pull down on the bottom-most card, then reverse spread the cards above while keeping the bottom card hidden under the reverse spread.
Whenever she separates, you do so as well somewhere in the middle, and secretly keep the mate under the upper half as you square up in each hand. She will now also have the mate underneath the packet in her left hand- remember, still mirroring.
Now have her do as you do in this order:
Raise your left hand to about shoulder level (the packet without the mate)
Turn over the other packet with the same hand its in (mate is now top)
Wiggle the right thumb
Use wiggled thumb to up-jog the top card (the mate).
The raised hand will now flip its cards face down and place it flush with the packet in your right hand, which leaves the mate cards out-jogged.
Two things- 1) wait for them to copy each step before moving on to the next. 2) wiggling the thumb helps somehow to up-jog.
Now that the both of you have the mates sticking out, I like to do this crisscrossy thing at the end for the reveal where: your right hand with the cards extend over to her right hand, then your left hand crosses over top to take the card sticking out in their left hand. This prompts her to remove your out-jogged card.
Additional thoughts: this doesn’t doesn’t have to end with mates. You can have the other matching pair in different places (i.e. inside box, in pocket, etc) as predictions. You can also just use this to force a card. It is a process, so not gonna work for everything.
NAME DROPS: I saw a mates routine from my friend Wei Ding, who saw it from either Shawn Farquhar or Howard Hamburg or Jared Kopf. It was a while ago that I saw it, but I think it’s this. I really only liked the hand raising part. And when Wei showed me, I didn’t get the mirroring and he had to correct me. So I reworked everything around that part- establish the mirroring earlier, and also let them shuffle.