One Handed Spin Card Trick

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. In actuality, magic takes a great deal of training and hard work; many performers have been practicing since early childhood.

Whether you are a budding magician, or just a card game enthusiast looking to bone up on his skills, impress your friends and learn some of the many ways to perform card flourishes. Our expert magician will demonstrate each flourish, with step-by-step instructions and tips for properly performing them. Tricks include card springs from hand to hand, the cascade, the quadruple cut, the butterfly cut, and the waterfall. For magicians, these videos will show you how to use these techniques without boring or confusing your audience, and without appearing like a showoff.

Video Transcript

" I’m Joe Marshall with expertvillage.com, and today we’re going to discuss flourishes. We’re going to get into talking about flourishes and fancy cuts and moves like that. These are the types of things you see magicians do on TV or the fancy gambler where he can spring cards from one hand to another. Everybody wishes they knew how to do it. We’re going to discuss the moves that you’re most likely to see, so that you can just break that out at your next poker game if you want. The first one is a cut; it’s one handed. The top portion will spin around in a 180 going to the bottom as the bottom portion comes up to the top. It’s similar to the Charlie cut we explained where you drop the lower portion of the pack, your first finger comes up and cuts the deck like so, but you’re going to stop at this point and change position and change grip as well. From the Charlie cut, in the sense where you’re only going to drop the portion of the packet and then the rest is completely different from there. Although you want the setup to be the exact same way with the fingers, so after you drop a portion of it, your first finger and thumb grab as your rind finger comes underneath to spin it and pivot around and complete the cut like so. In fast motion, it’ll look like this where the cards just come across and spin around. It’s hard to do slow, but here’s what it looks like. You drop the portion, first finger and thumb meet. That releases the rest of the fingers, your ring finger will come around back like so and touch the back corner. The back corner then will pivot around the first finger. Your middle finger will stay there so you don’t drop the cards, and you just keep pushing it around until both packets clear each other, and you drop it down like so. That’s the one handed cut where the top packet spins around. Done fast and quick it looks really impressive. Give it a shot. "