READING WITH THE PIQUET: THE GYPSY METHOD
I was going to put the word ‘gypsy’ in quotation marks because I was dubious about its claimed origin, but my yes-and-no stones confirmed this method did indeed come from gypsies. Ask the inquirer to shuffle the deck until they feel they’ve shuffled enough. When they’re done, they should hand the deck back to the reader, who will then cut the deck, with their left hand, into three piles from right to left.
The reader will collect the piles, starting with the center pile, then the pile on the right, then the pile on the left. The reader then turns the deck upwards with the face-side of the cards toward them. The reader will take the first two cards, pick out the card with the highest value and retain it in a separate pile to the left, but the other two cards must be laid aside in a separate pile on the right. The reader will continue on through the entire deck this way, taking each three cards, choosing the highest-value card and separating it from the other two. Remember in Piquet-deck play, Aces outrank Court cards in value, having a point-value of eleven. All the Court cards have a point-value of ten. So you may want to take Piquet-the-game’s point-assigning system into account when determining which is the highest-ranking card of the three. As you can see in the above photo, I didn’t.
The reader will first take up the laid-aside cards on the right, shuffle them, then look to see if there are any three-of-a-kinds in the deck, either three cards of one suit, or three of the same number from different suits. Any threes-of-a-kind will be tacked-on to the end of the retained cards as part of the reading. Save the three of a kinds separately from the rest of the laid-aside cards.
The retained-cards pile on the left will then be taken-up and laid out in a row in the order in which they were picked, so that means they’ll be laid-out starting with the bottom card in that pile, and working your way upward through the pile. Any three-of-a-kinds pulled from the laid-aside pile on the right will be laid-out at the end of the row (or below it, if there isn’t any room, as I’ve shown above), in the order from which they were pulled from the laid-aside pile. The reader will then read all the cards laid-out, in order, as their meanings dictate.
As you can see, this second method of Piquet-reading is free-form, and unstructured like the first. It calls on both the reader’s intuition, and their ability to string the cards together into a cohesive story which will be of value to the inquirer. Upside: you don’t have to choose a Significtor for this card-reading method.
I am including a PDF for both of these card reading methods below, for those who want to have it on-hand when practicing these spreads. And by all means, experiment with these two card-reading methods using other decks! The Tarot would lend itself well to the Gypsy method, and the Tarot, Morgan’s Tarot, the Lenormand, the Kipper, and the Sibilla would all appear to work well with the Six-Pile method.