Composition of a Deck of Playing Cards

Series Summary

Magic is an art of illusion, a practice in deception, a training in trickery. People have been entertaining, deceiving, or swindling crowds throughout history with feats of prestidigitation, decorated with salesmanship, dramatic effect, confidence, and charisma.

Card tricks are among some of the most popular and infamous illusions used by magicians. With the illusion magicians use a great deal of showy techniques as so much of the art is in the dramatic presentation; consequently card trick magicians must learn to master using a deck of cards. In this free online video series learn from professional magician Chris McKay as he demonstrates card fundamentals, and techniques such as throwing cards, springing cards, overhead shuffle, spread turn, table shuffle, riffle shuffle, bridging cards, Charlier Cut, the Hindu Shuffle, as well as a magic trick.

Video Transcript

" Hello! My name is Chris McKay. I’m here on behalf of Expert Village.com and I am going to explain some basics of playing cards with you. If you’d like to check out more about my services, you can go to my website which is mckaymagic.com. Anyway, I just wanted to demonstrate just what a basic deck of cards consists of. We’ve got four different suits. I picked up the 3’s here. We’ve got diamonds, spades, hearts and clubs; that’s pretty basic and then there are also 13 different values that go with each of the four suits. They go two through ten in numbers and then go jack, queen, king and ace, in that order. There are several manufacturers of cards; I am using bicycle cards right here by the US Playing Card Company. They have a nice finish on them. I suggest pretty much any cards will do that don’t have a plastic coating. What you want is a nice finish so that they slide nicely and there is not a lot of friction so it’s worth it to pay the extra 50 cents to get a decent deck of cards. There are also different sizes of cards. These happen to be poker sized. They also come in bridge size, which is just a little narrower and they are just designed for playing bridge with. Casinos also have different kind of designs on their cards, sometimes they will have, these are called pips, and they’ll have pips in each of the four corners. It’s just kind of security precaution because it’s difficult to see the pips if they’re covered in certain ways especially on the aces. Sometimes casinos will also have rounded corners instead of pointed corners in two of the corners that way if a card is reversed, it t is easier to see because that corner will protrude. I don’t suggest purchasing previously used casino cards because obviously they are little worn in and they are not as nice as a brand new pack playing cards. Also cards come in bordered and non-bordered. These are bordered cards. There have a white border on them. Other types of card you might have seen is B-cards and the design pattern goes all the way to the edges on those and again if the cards are reversed in the deck, facing opposite direction, it’s pretty easy to see. Since these are all wide on the edges, you cannot see. When there are no borders, it’s easier to see a card facing the opposite direction. That’s the basics of different types of cards. I suggest just standard Bicycle cards by the US Playing Card Company. They also offer another type of cards called Tallyho. Those are really the best, they last a longtime and they feel really nice in your hands. So those are different styles of playing cards. "