Hi guys, right now I'm focused on practising riffle stacking and all the stuffs "around" it, and I'd like to hear your thought, advice, critique ecc.. But first I have to set my camera in the best position possible, and maybe I can speed up the process asking you what's the best!
Here's a mini-sample. (if you have already some advice please tell me!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJPSkJ-sIJ0

(as you see my english is not so good, sorry for that)
Francesco

Here's how I consider things.

When I show a video here (or for my customers), there are two cases:

- Case one, I want other people advice, because I'm not 100% pleased with some sleight. Maybe I do it for too many years and it's not OK anymore for today's' games. Sometimes it's a new variant and I want to save time, etc. There could be many other reasons. Thus I show the worst possible angle. Best way for people to see the flaws and to get true comments. You save a lot of time, trust me.

- Case two. I want to illustrate, demonstrate a move, 90% of the time after a request (Magic Café, mails, Facebook...). I just show the move, I mean I don't particularly try to hide or to expose something.

That said, most of the moves, if you want a good advice, show them from the front, other players angle of view/perspective. Never show a move from the top, like almost everyone do! You want comments and to improve, you're not looking for praise. When you see people demonstrating a Zarrow from the top or necktying their seconds, it's just ridiculous.

Perfect, so from the front it will be, thanks arnold! Your answers are always full of details

Already asked to Arnold, but get some other advices is always good. Here's a video with camera from the front (sorry for the noise).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keA0BiG1OTU

In my opinion this is pretty good !

In your demo you do four shuffles, the last one is just to pre-empt the fairness of the cut.
For a magic demo and in your example I prefer to go near the "RRSRC procedure". So I prefer to lose about the fairness of the cut and do only three shuffles instead of four. I presume it's a matter of taste. What you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts.


what you want is a pocket pairs for the Hijack in a 6 handed game. Four of a kind on the flop.
what you need is xxx3xxxxx3xxx33

I will do something like : (I always cut the top stock on the left)
Riffle Shuffle - 3 cards (right) under two (left)
Riffle Shuffle - 5 cards (right) under one (left)
Strip cut of the bottom half onto the top half with an injog.
Riffle Shuffle - 4 cards (right) on the top stock (left)
Slip cut.

Indeed while I'm not so skilled, I have to choose between following RRSRC or doing a convincing cut. Of course doing both it's much better, (but harder! ). I'll try to show you what I can pull off.

LoicJ said: Slip cut

Argh, you killed me.

LOL Arnold ! ... I also said "for a magic demo" as a disclaimer. :p

I don't know the name in english of the technic that FNB used for the last shuffle. But while I was watching the video, I felt unconfortable. The riffle shuffle looks a little bit weird. IMO this is not because of the skill of Fnb, it's because of the nature of the move.

So I was thinking about what I will do personally and I may opt for the slip cut indeed. If FnB agrees, we could also talk about good cutting sequence during riffle stacking in this post ?!

The technique he uses is described in one of my booklet. A variant is also in Steve Forte's Poker Protection and other places.

You have to watch angles and FnB doesn't do it perfectly so far, but I'm confident he will.

I understand that sometimes we talk about Magic, demonstrations, etc. here, which is nice, no problem. And contexts are different, blablabla. But I like when it looks credible. Show me a game where you can do a slip cut and I come right away.

In Gambling context, cuts are done using one hand, period. OK, Magic context. But what about if a "real" player is in your audience? Like it happened to me a long time ago, you're gonna hear "Geez, we don't cut cards like that in Poker buddy!". It was quite some long time ago, but trust me, since then, you will never see me not performing a nice and clean cut, even for my 10 years old nephew.

@LoiJ
Of course we can talk about cut ecc... I'm super intersted in everything that concern riffle stacking. And indeed the technique is quite awesome, but it's just me who has a lot of work to do (and if Arnold says it there's no doubt ).

The other day I was experimenting with an action cam stuck in my hat while practicing something with my old three mirrors. Still playing around with it but they are good these little cams for action.

Try a GoPro + Mouth Mount.

I was thinking of a fake cigar.

Because split stacking was making me mad I stopped momentarily practising it and moved to second deal instead. I know this is not so good, indeed sometimes I miss a catch or I'm not precise pushing 2 cards aligned (and it's quite obvious that I deal the second card), but for now here's what I can achieve from some practice.
Advices and critiques are always welcome

http://youtu.be/5ilYCNZ07tA

What situation requires a second deal, into a large pile - directly in front of you?

Oh well, you're for sure right, but now I'm just trying to get confident with the move at its basic level as you can see. For me now the only matter is: pushoff - reaching the second card - extraction. Do you suggest to move on already practising it dealing around as in a normal game?

Anything is better than practicing (and burning into your muscle memory) into a pile directly in front of you.

If your eventual plans don't call for some sort of normal dealing procedure, (a la poker demonstration) then at the very least deal into a pile across the table from you, or something more closely resembling what you might eventually use a second deal for.

Perhaps you're going to do an effect which results in a single pile in front of you, in which case you're definitely on the right track

Oh ok! So I'll switch to a normal dealing procedure, thanks for the advice!

After seeing the last video by JFX (this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXYw5E9o-NU ) and trying to reproduce it , I also tried to achieve the same result following RRSR... or at least a kind of sequence that remember RRSR. Anyway here's my shot at it, what do you think? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdZQ-Gp8NBk
Big thanks to JFX for the idea and AMcD for the rest.