I learned my first tetradistic stack from Erdnase’s book, The Expert at the Card Table, fifty-seven years ago. S.W.E. said to take Ace through King, shuffle, throw on the table, and memorize the thirteen. Repeat the same stack four times, so mates are thirteen cards apart, and keep like colors twenty-six cards apart. That was about the length of his description, one short paragraph.
Over the last five decades, I have written several articles about why I like this stack the best – the good news is that you can do the majority of memdeck tricks with any stack. But if you need to cull cards, nothing out there can beat a tetradistic stack. I have two effects I have been doing for over 56 years: various versions of the Marlo Matching routine from Faro Controlled Miracles and another effect that I now call Ackerman’s Opener. They are two of the most potent card effects I know, and you can perform them with any tetradistic stack. About 20 years back, I worked out the A&D sandwich with my friend David Solomon, my go-to trick for two decades. That effect also works best with a tetradistic stack.
While Tamariz and the Aronson are great stacks, they lack the cull properties that a tetradistic stack has. So, those two stacks never enticed me to switch. When Patrick Redford released his Redford stack that could go from Si Stebbins (a tetradistic stack) to a parallel stack and visa versa, I almost switched to his stack, but when Jennifer Gwinn released Tetra-Red, I could not resist. She incorporated much of Patrick’s great work into a tetradistic stack. Hence the name Tetra-Red. It is easy to get into from a new deck order. You can use the Chinese Shuffle from a shuffled deck to get set up for the stack; you can go from Si Stebbins to Redford to Tetra-Red and back with a few overhand shuffles.
I have been using this stack for almost three years now, and the cool thing about it is that it preserves CHaSeD order, but the audience will not see it. See my article, The Thirty Minute Memorized Deck and Bonus Cull, in All-In Vol 1. The performer can name any card’s location in the deck and vice versa in a couple of hours of practice. S.W.E. said twenty minutes – it took me two hours. Another cool thing is if you cut the 6S to the face, then when you go from the 5S … 5D, a run of 14 cards, you have thirteen spellers and one value you can count to, the 7D. To say I love this stack is an understatement.
I think the reader will find a lot of great material in this book. There are some excellent poker and hold ’em routines. A super cool tetradistic routine called Fourgathering and seeing Jenn’s solution to her ungaffed Ultramental handing will put a smile on any cardician’s face.
Allan Ackerman
January 29, 2024
From the Preface of Allan Ackerman’s All-In Volume I:
The reader will find a wide variety of card material in these two volumes, from the almost self-working, (e.g., “Grandson of Tetradism” and “Technicolor Splits”), to routines that will take a fair amount of time to master, (e.g., “The Extended Merlin” and “Two-Shakes”). I love memdeck work and have used the tetradistic stack that S.W. Erdnase describes in The Expert at the Card Table since I was nineteen. I am so excited to be able to include the Tetra-Red stack by Jennifer Gwinn in this book. She has made what I call S.W.E.’s 30-minute memorized deck into a thing of beauty. It is now the stack I use, and I feel it is the best.