Why Chasing Dovetails?
Where does the name Chasing Dovetails come from?
In 1919, Charles T. Jordan, a magician selling magic tricks and manuscripts by mail, published a saddle-stitched booklet called Thirty Card Mysteries. The first essay, Trailing The Dovetail Shuffle Back to its Lair was on the mathematics of shuffling playing cards on the table. This way of mixing cards was referred to as a dovetail shuffle because of the resemblance to the tail feathers of a bird that interweave back and forth. The name is as beautiful as the method itself, with all cards interweaving to create a seemingly random shuffle.
It didn’t seem like much at the time, but this essay was the starting point for a paper on the mathematics of randomness and shuffling of playing cards that eventually won Persi Diaconis, a magician and a mathematician, a MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the Genius Grant, in 1982. Persi discovered that it takes seven riffle shuffles to most fully randomize a deck, and this forever changed the way playing cards would be mixed in high-stakes situations, such as Las Vegas casinos. A few years later, Persi wrote another groundbreaking paper on the probability of a coin flip, determining that there is a slightly higher chance that a coin will land with the same side facing up as when it began. Though the advantage is fractional, this changed the way coin tosses get called in sports to decide which team goes first, because even a bias is considerable enough to affect the outcome of the game.
Somewhat unfortunately, the term “dovetail shuffle” went out of fashion by the end of WWII and has since been called the riffle shuffle, a name with which you may be familiar.
One of my favorite things about magic is finding lost mysteries, and reviving them for the modern audience, or readers. I’m forever chasing elegant solutions, and I love to get lost in the pages of obscure books for hours and hours, searching for new magic in old places.
And as for Charles Jordan, not much is known about him. He was interested in magic for a short time and moved on to more lucrative ways to make a living, pursuing the sale of radio equipment. But he still published a ton of magic and invented so many principles that it’s challenging to keep track. Much of it was lost through the years, and it is extremely rare to find any new Jordan material outside of Thirty Card Mysteries, a book that’s been long out of print and nearly impossible to find. I didn’t know it existed until it came up in an online magic auction. I bid way too much for it and won. Within that year I became obsessed with and managed to hunt down two more copies. When the right magician comes along asking about Charles Jordan, I’ll send them on the chase for his work, and if, or rather when, they come up empty, I have an extra copy I can pull out for them.
Connecting the dots on many Jordan principles has led to me publish my own booklet called A Trick for Chuck (Chuck, being Charles Jordan). I was able to combine two of his brilliant ideas with an effective way to set up the trick in front of people while adding more deception. To this day it remains one of my prouder published works. If we ever happen to bump into each other, ask me to see a trick for chuck (the illusion, not the book), I think you’ll like it.
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