The Classic Card Fan for Magic Tricks

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Joe Marshall with expertvillage.com and today we’re going to learn about fans and spreads. The first iron rule of an expert card spreader is they’ll take the deck right out of the box, it’s ready to go from there they keep it in numerical order and they do not shuffle or cut the deck. Most amateurs think that they need to break in the deck by shuffling it and cutting it, what that actually does is it’ll crack the texture on the cards and when you go to fan it mathematical even spacing is out of the question after that cause they’re going to catch nick, catch a corner, catch a crack whatever it may be and it’s actually going to give you an imperfect fan. The most basic common fan that everyone learns is the classic fan also known as the pressure fan and that looks like that, basically what you’re going to do is you’re going to hold the deck like this…two middle fingers on the top, thumb on the lower and it’s just mainly these two fingers are going to come into contact with the face of the pack and your thumb will be in the back right by your other thumb and that’s kind of used as a pivot point when you go do the spread, it’ll pivot around the back of the thumb. As you go to do it once you’re in position and you have your get ready, you’re going to apply pressure to the top and bottom with this hand and then you’re only going to apply slight pressure and you’re just going to start to turn it and as you turn you’re going to release pressure one by one. It’s the hardest fan, the classic fan is the hardest fan to learn, there is an alternate version to this, then there’s a thumb fan it’s a lot easier, it’s a lot quicker to get into you just have to do that basically and the way to do this is you’re going to hold the deck with the middle finger and thumb, excel your thumb is going to come up on the back and in slow motion it kind of looks like this…you’re just releasing cards one at a time with your thumb as it pivots around to the back, applying even pressure with the fingers and thumb on the center portion of the fan so in normal motion it looks like that. There isn’t anything else like key point to tell you about except for it’s going to be very frustrating to learn it and practice and dedication is going to give you the perfect even spreads. What they judge for when you do fan is that all the ridges and valleys are perfectly even spread at the top so that everything looks ecstatically pleasing."