One more from Bella

Last night, one of the gists of my talk about Magic with Bella was that I had never persevered in developing the manual dexterity required for sleight of hand magic. To this day, I am a terrible card shuffler, while my sister has somehow gained the skill of the shuffle-and-bridge. Bella excitedly told me she has a SPECIAL way of shuffling cards, and she wanted to show it to me first thing in the morning.

So this morning she showed me. The process is as follows:

- Take the deck of cards firmly with one hand, and rifle through them with the other: This makes a pleasing Fwwwwwwip sound, but does little to rearrange the cards.
- Spread the deck out FACE UP on a table.
- Turn them all to face down, moving them around as you do so.
- Pile the cards into a "perfect circle", and then deal out hands by picking random cards from the middle of the pile.
- Once the cards are dealt, THEN scoop up the remaining cards and pack them into a deck.

The whole process took well over 5 minutes.

Throughout, Bella was serious and thoughtful, as though she was trying to remember the exact order of her "special method". At the end, she smiled proudly and picked up her hand for a game of Go Fish.

I said that is was a very good technique.

"Maybe I should be doing the shuffling, nowadays" she replied.

Nowadays? Where does she GET this stuff?