How to Charlier Cut a Deck of Cards

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Chris McKay and I’m here with Expert Village.com to show you how to do one handed cuts. If you would like to learn more about my work as a magician in Los Angeles and in Cleveland, Ohio, then please visit my website at www.mckaymagic.com. Alright this is called a Charlier Pass. There are tons and tons different one handed cuts that there are out there to choose from but I am just going to show you the most basic it is called Charlier pass or Charlier Cuts, okay. Here is how it works. You want to hold the cards in your fingertips, not in your hand like you would if you were dealing but with your fingertips just like so. So right now, I’ve got my forefingers across here and my thumb right there. You want to position your pinky at the bottom here and you are ready to go, that’s the grip starting off. With your thumb here you’re just going to rock it forward; I don’t know if you can see that. If you rock the thumb forward then a chunk of cards will fall in your hands. So now these cards are a way out of the holding cards if they are being dealt, kind of a dealer grip sort of but I am holding more cards above it like this. I’ve got like a V. I will show you that again. I am just rolling my thumb up like that but I am not holding with any of my fingers. If I just let the gravity take the cards, they just fall; that alone takes a little bit practice. But when they fall in your hands now what I can do is push with my pointer finger, so I am letting go with my pointer finger at the end here and I am just pushing up with it, okay. Right now I have got full control over the cards. I actually am not even holding up with my pinky right now; my pinky’s off. I am pinching this triangle between my thumb and my pointer finger okay. This next part is where it gets a little tricky, if it isn’t tricky already. You are going to continue pushing with your pointer finger and let go for a moment with your thumb. So you can see what’s happening here, I am not holding with my thumb and the cards here are just balancing on the other packet. My thumb was pinching here before. My thumb just lets go and then these cards can balance here. So if I continue pushing with my pointer finger then these will fall out of the way and on to my pointer and into my palm and then if I continue to let them fall, then the other half will fall at the top. So we will go in kind of slow motion pushing up and letting it fall. Yeah, you can help it a little bit with your thumb here; you can push with your thumb to close. Now I see a lot of people when they start off and they push with their pointer the cards get skewed. You see this? The cards are skewed. So if I continue pushing here these cards never come out of the way of these. So what you can do when you are first starting out just to get the basics down is you can push with your pinky also. So if I push with my pinky and my pointer, then I’ve got pressure on both sides and I’ve got a lot of support, See my pinky is pushing up like that. Good luck with that, Charlier Pass."