WHO IS THE HITMAN?

I've had the good fortune to spend time with some great card men and Sal Piacente is the best. His memory work is STAGGERING. If you have not had the pleasure of seeing Sal work, it is difficult to describe what you are missing. The last time I caught up with Sal, he astounded me time and time again with his incredible memory abilities, memorizing cards and sequences, tracking cards though shuffles, and generally doing things with cards that should simply not be possible. Sal is an expert casino gaming consultant, and is sought after by casino's around the world for his expertise. But his expertise in memory work is an area that some may be unaware.

I first met one of the great card guys, Sal 'The Hitman' Piacente, around 2012. Sal was passing through town after attending a large Asia Pacific gaming conference. Sal performed a set of amazing card magic and spent a couple of hours discussing the various techniques he uses and talked a little about his work as a casino consultant. I was already somewhat familiar with some of the routines he performed at the beginning of his set which included a pseudo memory demonstration: naming removed cards, his ace cutting routine using riffle add-ons and packet estimation. What struck me most was the casual and effortless manner with which he performed his set. He often appeared to be improvising and this caught me off guard. Despite having seen all of the material before, it felt great to be taken in just a little, by his almost nonchalant approach to delivering what was essentially a well structured and tightly honed set. A set I am certain he has performed in the exact manner thousands of times before. This was a great lesson in the power of a well structured set and the first of many lessons Sal shared over the next two hours. Sal performed a range of poker, hold'em, and bridge demonstrations and routines, and discussed important techniques and tips on signal play, shuffle tracking, switching cards and other cheating strategies. Sal also shared tips on handling cards in a natural way, and avoiding many of the common tells displayed by magicians when handling cards. He also showed a range of clips exposing various cheating techniques including recent trending scams, and showed plenty of examples revealing the ploys of real cheats at work. Most enjoyable for me was Sal's work with memory and recall techniques, which he expertly demonstrated in a variety of ways. Sal tipped a ton of real methods and provided plenty of sources and reference material to follow up with on various techniques. Sal also mentioned the possibility of releasing a book one day, which I can tell you I would buy without hesitation and sight unseen. There are very few people with Sal's in depth knowledge on combining card techniques used for cheating and magic. Fast forward a couples of years...

When we caught up next, Sal fried me repeatedly with his insane memory abilities and cheating demonstrations. I managed to return the favor a couple of times that evening but one of the things I did which managed to fool Sal stood out in my memory, because it didn't involve the tools I know well (memory, estimation, sleight of hand), but instead came from an improvised effect with an equally improvised one-way deck. The improvised stunt resulted from having accidentally grabbed the wrong deck of cards from my desk on the way out the door before leaving to catch up with Sal. The deck I'd grabbed was a full deck of King of Spades that I'd been using to make gaffed cards for an effect called Dirty Tactics.

I'd actually grabbed two decks when leaving home, and I thought that the KS deck was a deck that was set up in my stack. At an opportune moment I'd switched the shuffled deck we'd been using for the KS deck, gave the cards a false shuffle and immediately realized my mistake upon glancing at the bottom card to check it was the bottom card of my stack. Glimpsing the top card helped me confirm what I'd suspected from seeing the KS on the bottom. Another KS. Not skipping a beat I handed the cards "back" to Sal and asked him to shuffle them. He did several riffle shuffles and I was sure he was going to turn them over at any moment.

Anyway, I can only roughly remember the effect that I improvised, but I tried my best to make the effect resemble something that looked "almost possible". After choosing a card and shuffling it into the deck, Sal cut cards multiple times following my precise instructions, freely eliminated cards and eventually arrived at a single card. It was his selected card. I could tell he'd been fooled, and he asked immediately if I'd been using a crimp, trying to backtrack through the steps I'd had him go through.

It was a moment to savour. I didn't tell Sal what had happened until a few months later.

Sal's dedication to and work on memory is phenomenal. I have seen nothing like it, and to spend time with Sal talking about his passion for memory is to witness obsession. Having glimpsed Sal's writing on the subject, I cannot wait until some of his work sees print. It will certainly change the field of memory as a tool for card men, but goes much deeper in it's application in other areas. Cards have been a lifelong passion for me and among the greatest personal highlights for me is to have spent time sessioning with Sal, and in particular witnessing his work with memory. And it was a great pleasure to have had Sal critique a couple of techniques I occasionally use and offer killer tips on improving them. It's a bit of a cliché to say this but when a guy like Sal stops you midway during something you're doing to make a suggestion, it pays to listen. For example, with just a few words, Sal instantly made my false shuffle technique ten times better. Above all else, I'm grateful for Sal's generosity. When writing my first book, The Devil's Staircase, I knew that Sal was the only person I would ask to write the foreword, and thanks to our shared interest in a bunch of areas including the obvious things like gambling material and cheating themes, as well as run-up shuffles, stack work, estimation and memory work, he agreed.

If you have an interest in gambling material, casino protection, cheating and scams, check out Sal's website www.salthehitman.com