Video: Bridging Playing Cards when Shuffling

Learn how-to bridge the playing cards when shuffling before you deal them out in a card game in this free magic trick video.

Video Transcript

Hello! My name is Chris McKay and I am doing this video for Expert Village.com. I am going to show you guys how to do a bridge today. If you would like to see some of my magic or book me as a magician in Cleveland or Los Angeles, you can check on my website at www.mckaymagic.com. So after you have done a riffle shuffle you can do a bridge which looks like that. It's like the cascading part of it. Not this but this. You can do it even if you weave the cards together, you know regardless of how you put these cards alternating and you can do a bridge alternating. Now the purpose of a bridge is that when you are doing your riffle shuffle here, you are bending the cards this way and now see if I just square them together you can see that these cards are now bent upwards, they are bent in this direction and a bridge bends them back in the opposite direction. After you have done that part, you bend them back the other direction to do a bridge and so it leaves the cards pretty flat which is nice and plus looks fun and cool, interesting. Here is how it’s done; you got the cards riffle shuffle together. You want to take these pointer fingers that were bending the cards before and put them on the outside for extra support here, so they are on the front here. The other fingers stay just where they were and the thumbs are moving to right at this little overlap area, this half inch or so of overlap, that’s where your thumbs are and your thumbs are crucial to this. You need to keep your thumbs with pressure on top, on top. There’s got to be pressure with your thumbs because if your thumbs aren’t pushing down the cards are going to un-shuffle and you don’t want that. You want to have plenty of pressure with your thumbs and then you are going to bend with your hands with your wrists and also with these fingers on the bottom; these fingers are going to bend the cards, so now you are creating this arc okay. Now if you don’t create much of an arc you are going to have a really weak bridge and the cards aren’t even going to end up square; you can see these cards aren’t actually completely square yet. So what you want to do is you want to bring them together so that they are about as close together as one playing card because that’s what our final thing wants to be; you don’t want to just bend them this much, you want to bend them so that your fingers are about a playing cards at length apart and then that will give you a perfect bridge. I’ll show you one more time what this looks like. You are just bending with your hands and pressuring down with your thumb and then when you let go with your fingers at the bottom when you kind of release with your fingers at the bottom, the cards will just cascade one after another. So for a moment while the cards are cascading, I’m really only holding the cards with my fingers like this because you can even say for a moment these fingers aren’t supporting underneath the cards, they are just… I am just pushing together with the sides of my fingers; the fingertips have let go, so that the cards can fall one after another one more time, so that’s bridge.

Bridging Playing Cards when Shuffling

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