reviewed by Simon George (confirmed purchase)
Rating: ★★★★★ (Date Added: Friday 29 June, 2018)
The idea, in theory, is great. This is an easy way to memorize the number cards in a deck. However, the description is very misleading.
First, when someone looks at the deck, most of the cards are clumped together with their matching four mates. While there is no "pattern," it's obvious and very suspicious looking. In other words, the deck looks like the cards are placed in a specific order and not random at all. The basic Si Stebbins looks more random than this. Even a quick glance at the cards and they just look wrong. I can't even ribbon spread through the deck in portions because most of the cards are clumped together. In other words, spreading through any six or seven cards will almost always show a four of a kind at any given part of the deck.
Second, there is no "optic" way of memorizing the court cards. The only method is brute memorization. The way he words it in the book is even misleading.
In most cases, the whole point of a memorized deck is for the cards to look like they are in no particular order. If I can't show the faces of a deck, I might as well just use new deck order because that's easier than trying to use this system.