It's not insanely hard; it just takes some practice. The gist of what you'd do is: * Assign a word to each card. For example, the three of spades might be "pan

It's not insanely hard; it just takes some practice. The gist of what you'd do is: * Assign a word to each card. For example, the three of spades might be "pancakes", but I think people usually have some sort of digit-to-sound mapping (eg. three would be "s", spades would be "s", giving "sauce" or something). * To memorize the deck of cards, visualize a series of events involving the words you've chosen for the cards, interacting with each other in series. I use this technique to memorize grocery lists sometimes. If your list with "marshmallows, tomatoes, sour cream", you could imagine: * Walk up to the store. The doors open and millions of marshmallows pour out. * A 20-foot-wide tomato falls out of the sky and flattens all the marshmallows * You cut the top off the tomato and it's full of sour cream * and so on. Visual memory is a lot more durable than short-term memory (eg queen-of-spades, 3-of-hearts, ...). This kind of pattern is /really/ easy to remember. Building up the effortless associations from cards to trigger words, however, takes a lot of time.