How to Do the Riffle Shuffle with Playing Cards

Video Transcript

" Hello! My name is Chris McKay. I am doing this video on behalf of Expert Village.com. I am going to show you guys how to do a basic riffle shuffle; this is something that a lot of people have trouble with. If you’d like to get anymore information on me and my services as a magician, you can checkout my website at www.mckaymagic.com. This is what a riffle shuffle looks like. I will demonstrate it for you. This is a bridge; I’ll teach you bridge on a later video but I guess for now to avoid confusion, I’ll just riffle shuffle and then you can just square the cards together. That’s what it looks like. If you want to grab the deck into a brittle grip in your right hand, that’s gone over a little earlier in this video, so you are holding onto the deck with your thumb and these other three fingers at the bottom okay. You are going to riffle off portion of cards into your left hand and this is how you do it. Your pointer here is bending the cards. Your pointer sneaks in here and bends the cards and then your thumb gradually let’s go of some and you wait until about half by touching the tips with the fingers in your left hand and then you are going to swivel them over into your left hand and kind of the fulcrum here is these bottom fingers. So you are swiveling over into this hand and you are going to be gripping this packet in your left hand just as you were gripping the packet in your right hand, so they marry each other; I’ll show you that again. So I riffled off some cards into my fingertips and then using these fingers right here to lever, I’m levering it over so that I am holding it between my thumb and my other fingertips. You can square them together like that if you want. Then just like you riffle with just the right hand, we are going to riffle with the left hand also with the pointer causing pressure there and you want to give a little bit of overlap of about half an inch. The cards will just go together just like that. It’s not a perfect 1:1 ratio or anything but the cards are definitely mixed up and you can just squeeze the cards together. Another thing I want to point out, a lot of people think that you’ve got to have a surface here; you can do this in midair if you’ve really got a good grip of the cards, if you’re really doing it right, you shouldn’t need a surface underneath. Some people are in the habit of doing it over a table and riffling down onto a table or onto their knee or something like that. It’s not necessary. As you can see if I have a good enough grip at the bottom here with these fingers, these fingers at the bottom, then cards will support themselves in the middle and I don’t actually need a surface to shuffle over it, so you can do it in midair too. That’s the basic riffle shuffle."