Prearranging the Cards for Magic Card 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 six different intermediate level magic tricks using playing cards. Our expert magician will show you the trick first, and then reveal the secret behind it. Practice the techniques you’ve learned along the way, and hone your magic skills until you can perform these magic card tricks flawlessly.

This series is an Equilibrio Films production.

Video Transcript

" Hi! Malik the Magic Guy with expertvillage.com. Welcome to the second section on card magic. Now for what I’m going to show you, it’s important that you’ve watched some of the first stuff we talked about; it seems basic, but you should at least familiarize yourself with it, and it’ll make the other stuff that I’m about to show you much easier. Now I want to talk to you about prearranging your cards, setting them up before the trick starts, so that you have some sort of secret sneaky preparation done. In a minute, I’m going to show you a trick that uses the 4 aces, and I’m going to have those setup ahead of time; and after the trick I’ll show you what happens. But anytime you want to setup some cards ahead of time—like if I wanted say these 3 cards for a trick, I could set those up in the deck ahead of time—keep them in the box, and using the fake cut that I showed you before, the false cut, you can keep the cards in order and keep the cards where you need to have them in the deck, you can use some of the other false cutting ideas that I showed you. But anytime you’re going to have cards ready to go in the deck in any sequence, that’s called setting up or prearranging your cards. Right now we’re just going to work with some small ones; later on I’m going to do a whole section on setting up the entire deck in sequence, so that you can do some stuff with that. So that’s more on setting up and prearranging your cards, and in a minute I’m going to show a really cool prearranged card trick."