Full Deck Setups & False Cuts

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 do full deck setups and arrangements, creating opportunities to do card tricks specifically tailored to a prearranged order of cards. Also included are four magic tricks you can do to practice your new prestidigitation skills. Use these techniques to impress your friends or put on a magic show.

This series is an Equilibrio Films production.

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Malik the Magic Guy with expertvillage.com. Now I’m going to talk to you more about setting up cards, but we’re going to talk about setting up the whole deck and doing tricks like that. Now let me give you an example. In a few minutes, I’m going to teach you some tricks to do with a deck setup ace through king like this. And as you’re learning false cuts and false shuffles, that’s when something like this is going to become handy. Earlier I showed you how to do an under cut false cut, and I want to show you now how that works. So we’re going to start with the cards setup ace through king, you can see that there, and with a couple of under cut false cuts, you see that still is setup ace through king. So that’s really is a convincing way to make somebody think that a deck of cards have been mixed up when it hasn’t. Now one other thing I want to tell you about is generally cutting the deck. Now a lot of the full deck sequences you’re going to use, what you need to remember is the top is next to the bottom, so by that I mean that if you cut the deck like this, the sequence stays the same, it’s just your starting and ending points that are different. And for a lot of tricks that doesn’t matter, so you can still use your sequence, so you can even give the deck somebody to cut like this, and it doesn’t change the fact that your cards are still in order just like that. So using that concept and some ideas on false cutting, I’m going to teach you some cool tricks to do using different full deck setups."