Hathaway

Card Deck Memorisation

Memorising shuffled decks of playing cards most definitely requires a system, and there are two widely recognised approaches. The former I’ve used for a long time, having learned it from the work of the memory expert  Dominic O’Brien, and the second is the more complex approach from the mind of the great Ben Pidmore. At the time of writing (December 2024) I am continuing to come to grips with the Ben system (see comments below).  

Loci

The memory system of Loci (derived from ‘room’, as in rooms in your house which you can easily visualise) dates back to ancient Greece, and is a very efficient way of  using familiar locations to remember data such as the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards. You picture a journey you know very well, can visualise easily and so recall easily. Your mind is much more efficient when dealing with visual data rather than abstract values.

You then need to select a number of places important to you along a route you have chosen and know very well and, as you walk through the route in your mind, to each significant place you have chosen, associate and store some information – in this case a specific number of playing cards. 

When it’s time to repeat the order of cards, you then have to walk the journey in your mind from start to finish and, stopping at each specific place you have chosen, retrieve and read the cards you left there. 

But how? How do you convert playing cards into visual information that can be stored in the correct order, then later ‘read’ and so recalled easily from each location? Well, one way is to use the Person Action Object (PAO) technique developed by the great memory expert Dominic O’Brien.

In short, this requires each playing card to be associated with a unique person, unique action and unique object. If you look at my own personal list here that has evolved over a number of years (please feel free to download if you want – I have edited it here slightly to amend some of the more bizarre imagery), you can follow the next bit:

Lets say, at position one you store the cards 10H 7H and 4D in that order……… in this case you need to associate the image of Steven Hawking screaming at a garden shed. Ridiculous?? Of course it is! The whole point is you will remember this image precisely because it is ridiculous!

Now imagine the cards are the same ones, but the order they fall in is 4D 10H and 7H. Well, then you use the image of Roald Dahl winking at a crocodile.

And there you have it – each three part image at each of your locations will show the three cards in their correct order……… once you have managed the processes of constructing your own staged journey, then converting each card to your own personal PAO (i.e. one that works for you) all you need is a pack of cards and  practice. Good Luck! NOTE: personally, I use a 9 stage journey and encode 6 cards at each stage of it, but if you can alternatively go for a 17  or even 18 stage if you want – entirely up to you.

The Ben System

This differs from the PAO approach in that it encodes cards not on the basis of a particular person, action or object associated with a particular card, but rather on phonetic value(s) of both the suit combinations and card face values.

It was developed by the great Ben Pidmore as his alternative to the PAO system.

It still requires loci (see above), but one of the main differences from PAO is that it encodes two, rather than three, cards at a time. On the face of it this sounds less efficient, but, almost paradoxically, it seems to allow greater creativity and flexibility in forming images. 

You can see and download the bare bones of the Ben System here, and to give an example of it’s flexibility, consider these cards 4C, KC

The Ben System shows this as [first consonant] C, [vowel] o, [second consonant] p which gives Cop. This could be represented by either Cop (policeman), Copper (element) or Coprolite (fossilised dinosaur poo) etc etc. 

An initial difficulty with this is the large number of base images (you need to have at least one for every CVC: consonant/vowel/consonant combination) and this is a total figure of suit combinations (16) x vowel face value cards (13) x consonant face value cards(13). = 2704.

I started seriously looking at the Ben system this year and, at the time of writing this (December 2024) I am 1500 images in….. keeps your mind busy, and beats the hell out of watching crap on the tele!