How to memorise a deck of cards

The books teach two methods for beginners.

• A person for every card. Write a list of 52 people, from your life or famous, and sort them with the suits. In Photographic Memory, diamonds are the richest, hearts the ones you love, spades the ones you don’t really like and clubs the ones who party too much. Then walk your memory palace and leave one person at each stop, in the order the cards come.
• Small piles and a story. Memory Training splits the deck into piles of 13 cards, or even 5, and gives each card an association. The five of hearts is a family of five, the king of spades a gardener, the five of diamonds someone rich, the queen of hearts Alice, the jack of spades the jack of all trades. Then a quick story joins them: “My family gardener is rich because his daughter, Alice trades.”

The memory palace · Build your palace

On the first day, memorise five cards. On the second, recall those five, then add five more. Go on until the whole deck is yours. Each return is a small test, and testing yourself at growing intervals is the technique with the strongest evidence in learning research (Retrieval and spacing).

In the Speed Cards event, competitors get five minutes to memorise a shuffled deck and five minutes to rebuild it with a second deck. The count stops at the first mistake, and a full deck is ranked by memorisation time. The Card Deck scores your pile the same way.

Memory Training starts with two quick games before any memorising:

• Name the cards. Turn them one by one and say each card out loud, as fast as you can: “Red, five, hearts.”
• In turns. Say only the number of the first card, only the colour of the second, only the suit of the third, and so on to the end of the deck.

The same chapter ends with the matching game: all the cards face down, two at a time, until you’ve found every pair. You can play all three above, or with a real deck on the kitchen table.

A deck of cards trains the whole technique at once: turning things into images, putting them in order, coming back to them. That technique works for anything you need in sequence, from a speech to a list. It doesn’t make your memory better at everything else: the skill you train is the skill you get.