The Classic Fan Magic Card Trick

Video Transcript

"I’m Joe Marshall with expertvillage.com and today we’re going to learn about fans and spreads. The whole point of using a fan or spread is to actually do tricks with it unless you’re in a contest. Most of the time you’re going to be in a casual situation performing a card trick and this is something that you can do. You’re going to spread the cards out for a ribbon spread and just have them instead of pick one just tell them to touch one and say for example they touched this and you remove all the cards but that and you close it up and you show them what card it is and tell them to look at, you place the deck back, from here you can give them the rest of the pack have them shuffle it, put it back in the box, bury it in the back yard it doesn’t matter because you’re always going to tell them what their card is and in this case it was the Ace of spades. To do that it’s a technique called calling, as you’re ribbon spreading, ribbon spreading the cards as we explained earlier you’re calling the bottom card so you want to make sure that you don’t start out by showing them all the cards and then coming down because the card that everyone sees is the bottom card, you’ll just want to cut a card to the bottom in this case the card will be the Queen of spades and you start spreading from here and showing them the backs of the cards and what’s happening is you just tell them to touch one instead of pick one and what happens underneath the secret move is you start to spread and at the same time you pull the bottom card along as you’re spreading out the pack. So when you come down they can’t see that you’ve pulled that card from the bottom and say they touched one say for example they decide to touch this one, you’re going to square up the pack on that card and show them the Queen of spades but what they think is happening is that they touch a card, you square up and show them what that card is. Since you called the bottom card during the ribbon spread whatever card they picked, for example that one this is what’s going to happen underneath, as you square it this card that they actually touched will become the card that you called from the bottom of the pack and you just have to show it to them. What’s nice about this you don’t have to see it, once you cut a card to the bottom or shuffle a card to the bottom and you take a glance at it and you start to spread out and you tell them just to touch one of the cards, whatever card they touch and you cut the deck at that point to square up you can even just turn away to make it more fair for them or so they think and you just turn away and then from there you don’t even have to look at anything you just set the deck down again they can take the cards and just hold on to them and the sky’s the limit from here you can reveal a card anyway you want, you can draw it on a notepad, you can just tell it to them mentally or you can kind of have everybody draw and focus on something, like I said the sky’s the limit but that’s calling on a spread so after you spread you want to call the bottom card underneath so that they can’t see what’s happening."