What is the Key Card for Magic Tricks

Series Summary

Magic is an art of illusion, a practice in deception, a training in trickery. People have been entertaining, deceiving, or swindling crowds throughout history with feats of prestidigitation, decorated with salesmanship, dramatic effect, confidence, and charisma.

It is generally accepted today that there is nothing supernatural about magic; in essence, a magician is skillfully conjuring the appearance of true magic through sleight of hand, misdirection, and cunning. This is why many magicians call themselves "illusionists," embracing the idea that the audience enjoys the trick because they do not know how such an amazing feat could have been performed by natural means. Magic tricks are not only great for stage and street performance but are also well suited for entertainment at parties or as ice breakers at small gatherings.

Card tricks are among some of the most popular and infamous illusions used by magicians. In this free online video series, learn how to use the key card principle and the glimpsing technique to perform some amazingly simple, yet effective card tricks. Our expert magician will show you how to handle a key card and use it as a pointer, as well as explain the glimpse and how it is employed. Then learn five new tricks based on the key card and glimpsing and put your new magician’s knowledge to the test.

This series is an Equilibrio Films production.

Video Transcript

" Hi everybody! Malik the Magic Guy for expertvillage.com. One of the more important principles in card magic is something called the key card principle; that is what I am going to teach you about now. We are going to combine that with the principle called glimpsing in a little while. But basically, what the key card principle is, is when you take a card that you know of, let’s say the bottom card of the deck, and you use that to mark the position of another card. So let’s say they have selected a card like the 3 of clubs. We would have ways of putting this card on top of or underneath the 3 of clubs, and we could go through the deck and by looking for our key card, we could tell what card was next to it. That is the basic use of the key card, but you could use it for other things as well. For instance, if I had had a set up of cards on the bottom of the deck, so let’s say I had the 4 aces on the bottom of the deck, or near the bottom of the deck. Let’s say I had them behind the king, and I had some other cards here. What I could do is, if I wanted to spread through the cards and not let people see I had the aces, but I knew they were behind the king, I could stop when I got to the king, and then I would know that the next 4 cards behind it are the aces. So anytime you use a card or a group of cards to mark the positions of other cards in the deck, that is the key card principle. In a minute, I am going to teach you some other ways to use it: some tricks you can do with it and some fun ways to utilize the key card principle. "