How to Retain the Top Card Trick

Video Transcript

"My name is Wayne Phelps and I am a professional magician and we are here with Expert Village.com. Alright guys, now you have learned how to shuffle a deck. You know how to false cut a deck. Let’s go ahead and work on something that is a little more advanced. I am going to teach you how top retain a card. This is very important if you are doing a stack deck trick or you have to know what the top card is at all times. It is very easy to do. I am going to retain the card using a riffle shuffle. It is very simple. All you do is you split the deck into two packets and you do a normal riffle shuffle looks just like that except what you are going to do is you are going to hold on to that top card and you are going to make sure that the top card in the packet may be 5 or 10 cards its with drops last, just like that. Now to the spectators, it looks like you just shuffled the deck. Truthfully I only shuffled about 75% of the deck. Now I am going to do this one more time for you but this time I am going to turn the top card over. The top card is 7 of hearts. Watch carefully because that 7 while it looks like I have legitimately shuffled the deck, the 7 does not move from its top position. I am going to do it one more time with the 7 face up exposed so you can follow at home. Watch, split the deck into two pieces, shuffle making sure the 7 drops last and square. Once again it looks just like this when you speed it up. Your spectators won’t suspect anything. That is a top retention. "