False Cut Magic Card Trick

Video Transcript

"My name is Wayne Phelps and I am a professional magician. I represent Expert Village.com. Alright guys, so you have your cards and you are ready to learn how to do some magic. I use simple bicycle playing cards. You can pick these up at any drug stores. When performing you need a solid surface to play on. I recommend a table. I use a tablecloth or even a card mat you can pick it up at any magic shop; makes it easier to handle the cards. When performing card magic it is very important you have a basic understanding of how to shuffle a deck. You are probably familiar with a few of the shuffles such as a riffle shuffle, over hand shuffle, etc. It is important that you understand how to do these and do these well because when you start doing sneaky stuff, it just makes it more believable when you can shuffle realistically. Now magicians use a lot more fancier moves, we call these flourishes. A flourish can be anything like a card fan right-handed, left-handed or can be a ribbon spread with the card turnover which looks just like this. These are flashy techniques that just reinforce in the spectator’s eyes a magician’s exportability card manipulation and card handling. Of all of the basic card handling techniques it is really important that you learn how to do a false cut. False cuts are used to retain the order of the deck after it has been setup for a trick and fools the spectators into thinking that everything is legitimate. My favorite false cut is where you take the cards in a dealers mechanic grip position so they rest right here in the palm of your hand, left thumb against the left edge where fingers curl up against the right edge. You come in with your middle finger and thumb and strip away the back quarter of the deck. You come up with your ring finger and thumb again and you pinch off about the top quarter of the deck, replace the first packet then replace the first packet; in full speed it looks just like this. It looks really clean and your spectators will never believe that you just false cut the deck. I am going to do it one more time for you. This time I am going to expose the top cards so that you can follow everything that I do. It is just that simple. That is a false cut, really useful. Let’s just move onto something a little bit more advanced. I am going to teach you now how to do some top retentions. Check this out. "