How to Throw Playing Cards when Dealing

Video Transcript

" Hello! My name is Chris McKay with Expert Village.com. I am going to be showing you today how to throw playing cards, just the basics. If you would like to learn more about my work as a magician, then you can check on my website at www.mckaymagic.com. So here are some basics on throwing a card. Obviously, I have got a limited amount of space to work with here but I’ll try and show you my very best. What’s really important though is the grip anyway and the wrist action. So that’s what you really need to see anyway. So it doesn’t matter if you see how far I’m actually throwing the cards or whatever. Here’s all this and really the tendency with people when you handle them a card to throw it is they try and throw as hard as they can and that’s a bad thing. It’s kind of more of a graceful movement and so it requires a little more practice before you can take a full baseball throw with the playing card. First of all, this is the grip that I use. I mean there are all sorts of grips I mean and all sorts of variations and it really doesn’t matter but for beginners this one really gives you the most support. First you are going to clip one of the corners between your pointer and your middle finger just like that. Next you are going to grip the middle of the card with your thumb on top in the middle and then your ring finger on the bottom so that your thumb and your middle finger or your ring finger are holding the card and also your pointer and your middle finger are gripping the corner, so it’s a pretty solid grip of the cards. So all you want to do is cock your wrist all the way back in a 90 degree angle and as you let go of the card you want to have your wrist released and so just practice just doing the wrist at first and you will see the cards will spin a little bit and the more you stand with your wrist and with your fingers the more it will spin. Once you get good at that, you can add in a full elbow motion. Even what the world record holder takes you know three or four steps and lifts his arm above the head and throws the card but the micro part of this is that he is getting the card to spin with his wrist cocked and that’s very important. Just get a little practice and there should be no problem."