Card Forcing in Card Magic

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 about card forcing. Our expert illusionist will reveal the secret to this magical technique with tips on how to use force cards and how to perform magic tricks based on forcing. Types of forces include the cross cut, the cut deeper, the countdown, the 10-20, and the dice force.

This series is an Equilibrio Films production.

Video Transcript

" Hi everybody! Malik the Magic Guy for expertvillage.com. Now I’m going to teach you a very, very powerful tool in card magic. I’m going to teach you about forcing cards. Now there are probably four or five hundred different ways to force cards—there’s just so many—and what forcing basically is, is making somebody pick the card you want them to pick when they don’t know they’re picking it. I’m going to show you a few different methods to do it. Most of them are going to be a way where we can go through a selection process, and this will be an example of one. I’ll show you that we would cut the cards. And when they go through, we would know that they selected the 9 of hearts because we made them pick it. So I’m going to show you a bunch of different ways to do that: now some of these are going to be ones that you can do without touching the deck, I’m even going to show you a way to force a card without actually using the card itself. I’m going to show you a way to force cards using dice, I’m going to talk to you about some other ideas on how to make them pick the cards you want them to pick. It’s going to put a lot of powerful scenarios in your hands, and I’ll tell you about those as well."