How to Memorize a Deck of Cards

 How to Memorize a Deck of Cards

Here is the full, detailed method I used to memorize a deck of cards in my video, “I Learned How to Easily Memorize Anything.” I did not invent any of these techniques, I learned them by studying several resources. If you want to get started with improving your memory, I recommend the Art of Memory website.

As I said the video, I use the Memory Palace technique for this trick. This is a very popular and effective memorization technique that has apparently been in use for thousands of years. The memory palace is an imaginary location in your mind that you “store” images in, so you can revisit them later. This technique is very powerful and can help you memorize a large amount of information. In reality, memorizing 52 cards is a fairly beginner level feat - people have done much more impressive things.

So the first step is to create an image for each of the cards. To simplify this process (as well as help with memorization), I categorized the cards by suit. For me, Hearts were friends and family, Diamonds were famous celebrities, Spades were superheroes and supervillains, and Clubs were animals.

To choose the individual images, I then chose characters that fit the categories and started with a particular letter. Since the Ace, King, Queen, and Jack already have letters on them, I just picked characters that started with those letters. For example: The King has “K,” so, King of Clubs = Kangaroo, King of Spades = Killmonger, King of Diamonds = Kanye West.

For the cards that don’t conveniently have letters on them, I converted each number to a letter. I used a slightly modified version of The Major System, which is another popular system used by memory experts to help them remember numbers. Here are the letters I associated with each number:

2 = N

3 = M

4 = R

5 = L

6 = Ch (used to avoid confusion with K or S)

7 = G

8 = F

9 =  P

10 = S (or Z)

This is just something I had to memorize, but there are a few tricks to help you remember:

An “n” has 2 ‘legs’.

An “m” has 3 legs.

“Four” ends in R.

L is the roman numeral for 5-0.

6 - nothing great here - but I just think of the phrase “Six Chickens”

7 - again nothing solid - the number 7 looks like part of K. We already have K for King, so the closest thing is the hard G sound.

8 looks a bit like a cursive f

9 looks like a reversed P

10 - has a Zero which starts with Z, which is similar in sound to S

With that taken care of, we can now assign an image to each card using our number-letter conversions, and our predetermined categories. Theoretically, we can now insert these images into a memory palace with 52 different locations. 52 locations was a bit unwieldy for me as a beginner, but luckily the memory community has come up with a solution to that. Instead of putting a single card in 52 locations, we can instead store 3 cards per location, to cut the locations down to 17 (with one left over).

It could get confusing to try to remember 3 separate characters at each location, you may very well forget what order they go in, and also simply imagining a person standing in a location is not exactly the most memorable thing. So instead we use what’s called the Person-Action-Object system. Instead of simply creating a character for each card, we create a character, an action, and and object (Yes there is a lot of prep work to get this done haha).

Here are the images I created for each card. Some of these images are only meaningful to me, and may not make a lot of sense. In fact selecting meaningful, vivid images that specifically relate to you is the best way to go about it. Also in some cases, I replaced the Object with a Description.

Hearts : Various friends and family whose names start the corresponding letter associated with actions and objects meaningful to me. I’ll avoid doxing these people here lol. But for example, Jack of Hearts is my brother John playing a trombone.

Now that we have our images, we will memorize them in groups of 3. The first of the 3 will be the Person (or Character), the 2nd will be the Action, and the 3rd will be the Object (Or Description). So if our group of three is 6 of diamonds, Jack of clubs, 7 of spades; we end up with Charles Barkley climbing a motorcycle; which is a perfectly nonsensical image, which is perfect because the crazier it is, the easier it is to remember. So I always try to imagine to most bizarre version of the image. I would probably imagine a tiny Charles Barkley scaling a giant motorcycle as if it were Mount Everest.

Now this is where the memory palace comes in. In the video I used my apartment as the memory palace. I chose 17 locations in my apartment and imagined walking through, noticing each location one by one in order. The first location is just inside the front door. So in this case, I would imagine a tiny Charles Barkley scaling Mount Motorcycle just inside the door. The next location would be the couch in the living room. Then I just place my next triplet there. Let’s say it’s a Mouse hosting a show wearing horns. Do you remember which cards those are?

So when it’s time to recall, all I have to do it imagine myself walking through my apartment and simply remember which crazy images I stored in each of the 17 locations, and then simply translate the images back to the associated cards.

And that’s pretty much how you do it!

As I said in the video, this technique can and has been used for memorize an astonishing amount of information!