I stumbled upon this stack when reading a trick in James Swain’s book 21st Century Card Magic. The trick was “Just Lucky Eight Card Stack.” Swain mentioned the stack came from Alex Elmsley. Elmsley decsribes the stack in the book Collected Works of Alex Elmsley, Vol 1, in a trick titled “Just Lucky.”
The aspects of this riffle stack that make it interesting are:
- You can stack four of a kind for a five handed game with just three shuffles.
- The top card of the deck is “buried” with each shuffle.
- Each shuffle is the same, holding back the same number of cards and dropping those cards with the same pattern.
Start with four aces on top of the deck. Split the deck for a riffle shuffle, the top half to the right and the bottom to the left. Now with each shuffle (for a five handed game) you will hold back five cards with your left hand and four cards with your right.
Holding back cards is something that requires practice, but it is not too difficult to acquire the skill. The key thing is timing. You want to riffle the cards smoothly, timing it so you end up with five cards in the left hand and four in the right.
Then let four cards riffle off the left thumb, riffle all of the right three cards, and end with the last left card falling.
Repeat those exact steps twice more and the aces will be stacked to fall on the fourth hand in a five handed game.
If you want the aces to fall into the dealers hand you will need to add one card to the top of the deck. You can do this by taking a break above the bottom card of the deck and doing a double undercut to move it to the top. Alternatively you could use an overhand shuffle. Take the deck in overhand shuffle position, undercut half the deck, run five cards, injog the sixth and shuffle off. Undercut at the injog, run four cards and throw the remainder on top.
Below is a video of me practicing this stack.