I finally taught myself the Charlier cut this weekend. It’s a card move: a one-handed shuffle in which you basically flip one part of the deck up over the other using the thumb and index finger. I’d been trying to learn it for an absolute age - it’s seen as being a deeply simple piece of business, yet I struggled. In the end, there were two reasons it finally clicked for me. The first was a day of telephone calls, which gave me a lot of time to practice, phone tucked between shoulder and neck. The second, and this is quite weird, was switching to using my left hand. I’m right-handed, but for some reason I can only do this cut with the left.
