ONE MAN’S QUEST FOR THE PERFECT DECK OF CARDS
What makes a successful Pepsi distributor like John Walton go on a treasure hunt for a perfect deck of cards?
John could never beat his champion card player Dad at gin rummy, so he did the next best thing and began a quest to master the perfect faro shuffle…an esoteric field of card artistry where every single card is perfectly interlaced with every other card.
John’s quest to break the world record for the most perfect faro shuffles in a row required a deck specifically engineered for superior shuffles. So John searched out legendary card quality expert Richard Turner.
Richard has been blind most of his life and developed an almost supernatural sensitivity to every facet of a deck of cards. To create the perfect shuffling deck, Richard fine tuned the specific ingredients in the card’s finish, the amount of moisture in the paper, the thickness of the card stock, the depth of the ink imprint, and – most importantly – optimized the microscopic point of first contact of the edges where the shuffling starts.
The United States Playing Card Company agreed to take on the new deck as one of their own. And thus the perfect shuffling deck was born: The 809 Bicycle Mandolin Back.
Just in case you think we were bluffing, here is John’s world record from the Guinness book for executing the highest number of perfect faro shuffles in a row. Yes, now you’ve seen everything.