Editor’s note: Damn, that last post set a new record for reader mail in the first 24 hours! Don’t be afraid to email us; even if we enabled comments, we always appreciate emails. We’ll be featuring two in a long overdue Reader Mail followup if they agree to it. Anyway, now you should enjoy this followup from Franklin. I consider it an improvement over Drew’s already great idea (at least if you prefer to clock the whole deck), and it is a lot easier to do than most of his ideas that don’t involve app development. I might even get it down by next week, and that’s impressive for someone with my level of mental incapacity.

Drew showed you his little clock, but take a look at mine!

Following Drew sharing some rare footage (that you will never see!) of him performing the Burger clocking routine as faithfully as possible I was, of course, enticed to give it a shot myself. But I had no intention to limiting myself to one color and no court cards. Sure, it’s fast, but what if I could get fast without those limitations? I looked into the history of clocking techniques and found some interesting ideas recorded by Karl Fulves. By adapting them, within an hour I was clocking a full deck, unrestricted, in as little as 40 seconds. With steady practice, I could probably cut that down to 30.

Technique for Fast Full Deck Clocking

But anyway, here’s what you need to know to extend the technique Drew described to the rest of the deck:

• Assign the high cards these values:

• Every other card’s value is as written. This ensures that the full deck sum modulo 10 is exactly zero. Very convenient.
• As you scan through the deck, try adding together two or three cards in a gestalt before adding their ones digit to your mental running total (mod 10). Instantly adding numbers you can see is easier than adding a number that exists only in your mind.
• Also, looking ahead a few cards increases your chances of being able to cancel cards out and ignore them. For instance, if you see a Five, a Three, and a Five in the next clump, you can ignore the fives and just add the three. Likewise, you can ignore an Ace or Jack next to a Queen or Nine. They just cancel.
• When you get the sum for the whole deck, just subtract it from ten to get the missing card. Of course, if you get ten/zero, one, or nine, you’ll have to deal with the 10/K, A/J, 9/Q ambiguity. You can do that just by asking if the card was a picture card, or, once you know the color, checking both possibilities as you go through to look for the matching card.

Practice Method

I know what you’re thinking. “How do I practice this? Do I need a fancy mixed, marked deck like Drew’s practice deck?”

You don’t need to know the color in advance to practice this since you’re summing everything regardless of color. Therefore, all you really need is to put a pencil dot on the backs of the court cards. And you don’t even need to look for the dot until you have finished clocking and determined you’re in one of the ambiguous cases.

Performance Tips

Watching (Drew’s performance of) Burger’s routine, the ruse of upjogging cards seemingly at random gave less of the impression of “I’m looking for a matching card” and more of the impression of “I need to check whether I’ve got all four of this value.” Marking different cards along the way and then going back through the deck is exactly what someone who was trying to determine what the missing cards are would do. I would bet a significant portion of people will just assume you’re doing exactly what you’re doing if you play it this way.

I would suggest taking a page out of John Bannon’s book here of apparently committing to a card long before you could know what card is missing. In other words, when you’ve gone more than a third of the way through the deck and have just summed a card that brought your total to zero, memorize the card on the face and then cut the card you just counted to the face; squaring up the deck. Take off the face card and put it face-down on the table.

“Alright, I’m getting a good feeling about this card. I think it might match yours… but you know what? This is a very difficult thing to do. Just give me a moment to be absolutely sure.”

Now start over, clocking from the face of the deck. Stop clocking when you see the card you memorized before—since you’ve looped back to where you’ve started, you now have the proper sum and therefore the value of the missing card. Pick up the card on the table and look at it again. Look your friend in the eyes. Look back at the card. Tap its edge on the table.

If it’s not the right value: “Yeah, I’m kind of doubting this choice now. It’s very close, but it’s not quite right. Did you take a picture card?” Whatever they say, give a knowing reply and return the card to the deck. Go through the deck looking at cards with the right value to see which card of that value has no mate. Pull out the actual matching card and go.

If it is the right value (a rare hit), I’d say don’t even bother going through the deck again: “Yeah, I didn’t really get any stronger feeling than this one gave me. No guarantees, but if it’s not right, it’s at least very close.” This comment looks like a cheeky bit of humility if you did manage to hit it perfectly, and completely excuses the fact you got the color wrong if you didn’t.

All of this is to say that stopping halfway through and pulling out a card is a much stronger ruse selling the idea of “I’m looking for a matching card” than up-jogging random cards or going through the whole deck without stopping. And it’s certainly more engaging to break up the clocking into two twenty second bursts with some interaction between than to scan through the deck silently for over thirty seconds.

Hey, you know what’s really easy to clock? A deck being dealt out face-up one card at a time. Would anyone like to hear my ideas for how to adapt the classic scam Circus Card Trick to use clocking instead of a key card? No? Fine. Anyway, drop a comment here if you have any ideas for clocking that truly display Big Deck Energy.