I got lucky there, the only thing I ever had stolen was a Alpine deck

I've watched much of the clip at 1/4 speed and learned a little. SPOILER ALERT.

The marker vanishes are now definitely obvious. The first time he slips it into his vest. The second time he flips it to the back of his fingers then drops his hand behind him and discards it.





So, the vest definitely does come into play a lot. He also pushed a card into the lower opening in his vest at about 3:45 while misdirecting by spinning a card in his other hand.



That's all good and fine, but other things are not simple sleight of hand.

At 5:10 with his back turned he shows us the signed card with the hand behind his back. Then in full view he simply turns the card against his back. Then his other hand raises up from the other side of his body to reveal the "same" signed card. (The one that was in view, btw, he tucks up into his vest at this point, keeping in hand the blank that was paired with it.) The only possible explanation for the same card being in two places at once is there must be multiple copies of each signed card, which means he has stooges who sign the exact same way every time or he has a technological advantage like others have mentioned (tiny scanner and printer).

The other thing that confounds is how he has a signed card in one hand and a stack of cards in the other. Then in full view the tall stack shrinks down to (approximately) one card and the single card grows into a stack instantaneously. I guess there must be some kind of technological solution to this as well, but I don't know how a functional stack of cards (and not just the appears of a stack of cards) could collapse and appear... unless they aren't functional and it's a trick deck that can easily expand or shrink to look like a deck or single card.

At 6:00 when he just shakes the bag and the signed card inside changes to the other signed card, I think he just flips the bag around with his shake motion and that the single card is printed on the front with one signature card and the other signature card on the back.

That's the only thing that makes sense... which again requires a special scanner and printer setup... I guess.

Thank you for posting this. I watched and rewatched the routine a few times on my DVR and am still blown away by it.

I cannot imagine how he could possibly have done some of the things he's done, like making two cards switch hands at a distance in full view. Or making a functional stack of cards swap hands with a single, signed card... *WTF?!

Anyone have any reasonable explanations for how this could at all be feasible?

Just as good is the magician who fooled Penn & Teller by getting Penn's signed card in new-deck order inside a wrapped box of playing cards, while his hands were in full view the whole time.

Mind = blown.

Shoes are not used in poker, only blackjack. Obviously, there are hundreds of variations of poker, and one could pretty much make one up on the fly, so I'm sure it has happened, but in general, poker is always played with one, untampered, fresh deck of cards. I believe for high-stake games like this, they probably unwrap a new deck before each game. This is likely a production error, somehow 2 queens have snuck in in the factory somehow. Seeing as they were literally together in the deck, they probably were stuck and had not been shuffled apart yet.

Ok, yes you are totally right there.

I believe 11-12 players is generally considered the maximum for any given table, which leaves approx 50% of the cards in the deck for the dealer in any given hand.

Multiple decks in play would completely screw the probabilities and I too have pretty much never heard of it being done.

I assumed Trancecoach was referring to what I mentioned before, but reading it back you may be right.

Trance?

Yeah, I know that, but trance was suggesting you can have multiple decks in a hand (like in blackjack), which is pretty much unheard of in most poker games.

That's they key here it is played with one deck at a time, but there is often more than one deck knocking around in the shoe. Especially when playing at a high level they can swap decks as often as every couple of hands.

Cards quickly start to bend and warp & when the blinds alone are in the 100's or 1000's the cost of a new deck every few hands is pretty negligible. A decent casino will swap the decks frequently throughout a night/tournament.

The above should not happen if proper procedure is followed, one deck should never touch or mix with another, but I can see how it might happen by accident.

Other likely possibility is a manufacturing defect, though again with proper procedure that should be spotted when a new deck is spread out for the players to see. (also very unlikely with high grade decks).

This is Texas Hold 'em, and it's only ever played with one deck. The entire point of texas hold 'em is that a good player can calculate the statistical probability of what he has versus what the other players have, because they can all see the community cards.

If you introduce a second deck, it would completely mess up all those statistics. It's possible there are multiple deck variants of poker, but this certainly isn't one of them.

Tournament poker is always played with one deck at a time.

Not kidding. Some poker is played with an extended deck, multiple decks, or stripped decks (where certain cards have been removed). But the reaction here gives the impression that it was a "mistake" (or a cheat), but not entirely unheard of. Makes for some freakish poker hands, like 5 Aces, etc.

Um, does no one understand that poker and blackjack are played with multiple decks in the shoe?

ExxonMobil had the Bush administration lobbying strongly to replace the chair of the IPCC with a more agreeable alternative, which we know about because of a leaked memo. So let us not pretend that the IPCC are above the skepticism of being politically influenced. The name "intergovernmental panel" says it all, in my opinion; i had assumed the I stood for Independent.

I don't apologise for not reading the entire thread because i noticed that in your first post you said the following, and it gave me cause to doubt your take on the science in the rest of the thread. I've been in too many discussions in which i spent hours researching only to find out people were completely wrong, and i spent 45 mins on your first paragraph already. Anyway here is the quote again:

"IPCC best estimates for 2100 are about 1.5 degree increase, so another hundred years and increase that is about twice as bad. Of course, it's twice as bad as what we saw the last 100 yeas and not only survived, but thrived under."

Firstly, the planet's flora and fauna have most certainly NOT thrived during that time. Humans have flourished by exploiting nature, so yes we have 'thrived'. In the same way that if i were to steal money from a dozen old ladies, i might say i was thriving even though i was out of work during the economic downturn. Pretty much every source agrees that the one thing the ecosystem is not doing is thriving - we are in or on the verge of the sixth mass extinction on the planet. So this is an inspiring yet futile "hurrah for us!" bravado that ignores the truth; we stand on the deck of a galleon around a big bonfire, ripping up planks and chopping up the boat, throwing it on the fire and going "we're all lovely and warm!" as we sit lower and lower in the water.

Secondly and in my opinion most significantly, according to the IPCC conclusions on page 8 you have used the term "best estimates" to mean "best case scenario" rather than "most reliable estimate" - which is why i have downvoted that comment, as it is misleading and incorrect. I would say it's cynically misleading, but i suspect you've lifted that from a cynical source rather than being cynical yourself.

I don't know if you realise, but you referred to only one result out of four, the rest of which strongly indicate a greater than 2 degree rise. Your reference is to RCP 2.6 which assumes CO2 emissions peak between 2010 and 2020. A decade in which the most populous countries on the planet are developing and a decade in which we must start to reduce global emissions so that we have a good chance of your best case scenario happening. We are already half way through it, and according to Mauna Loa observatory and every other source i could find (including EPA, NOAA and IEA) we are still increasing our CO2 emissions year on year including this year, where we've broken the 400ppm milestone, 120ppm greater than pre industrial times, half of which occured since 1980 (Pieter Tans).

So in fairness, you might have underplayed the IPCC report (which you seem to get almost all of your information from) in as much as newtboy might have overestimated the dangers and rapidity of climate change. I think you're out on a limb by telling him that the scientific community disagrees with him and he's using dodgy sources, when you've cherry picked one quarter of a conclusion from one source (the IPCC) to argue for your best case scenario which you refer to (unscientifically and incorrectly) as the "best estimate".

However, i do at least appreciate that despite your doubts (and in my opinion, slight confusion over the results, i don't think you're being intentionally misleading) you are very much behind changing our behaviour and using resources that are more appropriate... and that's what really matters right now is that people recognise the need to change.

It doesn't matter if it's an incumbent or the challenger. Voting out all incumbents who don't represent the people for challengers who also don't is simply shuffling the deck. Influence party nominations the get it candidates on the ballet who do, and vote for the best candidates, even when you have to choose between crappy ones to register the fact you do vote.

All those things help.

Baby steps towards Holo Deck 3...

You are quite right @MilkmanDan - after seven random shuffles the chances of the top card staying at the top the whole time would be 1/128, which should be sufficient - it would probably sink down a bit sooner, and thus be distributed evenly throughout the deck when you shuffle it that many times. The top card and bottom cards each have a 1/2 chance of staying where they are after a single riffle shuffle.
And I do have a quite decent riffle shuffle; I just had a silly math brain fart.
But hey - what would the sift be if everyone thought things thoroughly over before posting?

The maths is 7-11 riffle shuffles result in a random deck. Your inability to perform a proper ripple shuffle doesn't change the maths.