Walter
I have relatively poor manual dexterity, compared with professional magicians. Yet, I have been on a quest to learn the Faro Shuffle for quite a while. I bought the "Unshuffled Kicker" a couple of years ago, and wanted to be able to perform such things, but became frustrated that I lacked the capability. Some months later, I decided to seek the written counsel of Ed Marlo, but his "Revolutionary Card Technique" book was sold out here at Vanishing Inc Magic. Therefore, I put it in my Wishlist, and waited for it to become available again. When it did (a month or so ago), I bought it and started reading the famous chapters on Faro Shuffle and Faro Notes. I had purchased some Bicycle Elites and some Phoenix decks from VI, and so I was ready to dive in... but I still failed. Over and over and over, I failed. Marlo's instructions are legendary and surely accurate, but I failed at every one of hundreds of attempts. Always close; never perfect.
Yesterday, I was visiting the VI site, and found that the downloadable video, "The Faro Shuffle Project" was the second-best seller here, and I was intrigued. I purchased it, downloaded it, and this morning I set aside an hour to watch the first parts of it. (Note that the entire video downloads amount to almost 4 hours of instruction!) During those first parts, I gained enough instruction to try again with slightly different technique. And within the first half-dozen attempts, I succeeded at doing two perfect faro shuffles! I am now back on my quest to learn how to reliably do this, and incorporate it into illusions. Since I am also learning Mnemonica from a book by Juan Tamariz, I have quite a journey ahead towards significantly enhancing my abilities to work with cards.
Thanks, Vanishing Inc!
If you are on a similar quest to learn to reliably faro shuffle, then I highly recommend this downloadable video. (Note: If you find, as I did, that the "Download" buttons don't work, then choose the "Play video" buttons, and you'll see another "Download" button on the page with the video playback frame...that button should allow you to save the video files to your computer.)