Learn an Easy Magic Trick!

hi my name is Daniel Roy I'm a sleight-of-hand magician and I'm a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying neurobiology and just like the rest of the world I'm stuck inside right now with the recent corona virus outbreaks the whole performing arts industry is pretty much on pause and magic is no exception so while I'm here and everyone else is in their own place I figured I might as well offer up a magic trick for people to learn hopefully it'll brighten up your day a little bit and take your mind off the world events and if you practice it you'll be able to perform it for all your friends over over video chat if you've ever been and scared to learn how to do a magic trick as your chance grab a deck of cards doesn't have to be a new deck and be an old beat-up deck it doesn't matter I will perform the trick and then I will explain all the various steps and techniques that you'll need to be able to do this for your friends I'll start by giving the card some shuffles and if there happens to be anyone a co isolating with you they can shuffle the cards as well as many times as they want now as I spread through these cards I just want you to touch one on the back and I'll spread through them slowly so let's say they point to this one here so this will be the selected card so I will look away and I want you to memorize that card lock that card in your memory got it great now I'll cut some cards down to the table be about here and I want you to drop the card back and I'll put the rest on the top in fact you can square the cards up if you want to now would you give me a favor I want you to cut over about half the deck like it's done in the game and then put the rest on top in fact if you want to cut the deck again you can do so and you can have other audience members do this as well you can have another person come up if they want to cut the deck they even cut the deck if another person wants to come up in bed and do so they can cut the deck as many times as they want now I'm gonna take out a pair of cards it'll take out the red kings you didn't pick a red King did you okay good so I will go through the deck and I will take out the two ready kings so the first one is the King of Diamonds and the second one should be the king of the Hearts King of Diamonds in the King of Hearts now in a moment I'm going to count to three would you be impressed if the instant I reach the number three your card materialize in between the two red kings I'd be pretty amazing right the instant I reach the number three your card will be in between the two red kings here goes one two three done because there's one red King on the top of the deck then there's every single card of a deck and then there's another red King on the bottom so technically speaking your card is in between the two red kings right but usually people aren't very impressed so I have to do it for real one red King on the top the other red came on the bottom in just an instant you'll see one card materialize in between the kings and with any luck should be your 8 of spades so now I'm going to explain exactly how to do this trick in order to do so I'll need to walk you through all of the various sleight of hand techniques that are used the very first thing you need to learn how to do is how to hold a deck of playing cards this is going to be the most boring thing you'll ever learn but I promise it's well worth your while there are two main ways that cards are held the first is called left hand dealing position the cards are held in my left hand this edge of the deck is against the base of the thumb the index fingers at the front the thumb is on the side and there are three fingers along this side the tips of all of these three fingers here are in line with the top card of the deck in other words they're not sticking not too far nor are they too far down they're in line with the top card of the deck as is the index finger and this side of the deck is resting not too deeply against the base of the thumb now in terms of how tightly or loosely you want to hold the cards a good metaphor is to imagine that the cards are a bird you want to hold the bird tightly enough that it can't fly away but not so tightly that you crush the lanes the next grip is what's called right hand end grip here's what you're going to do you're going to take the left index finger and you're going to extend it underneath the deck now you're gonna take the right hand and you're gonna take your right thumb and it's gonna go at the back of the deck right here right along the middle and then you're gonna take three fingers these three fingers the second third and fourth finger and these go along the outer edge now notice that the thumb and these fingers protrude below the edge of the deck so you're gonna lift the cards out of your hand and you'll also notice that the index finger curls on top you don't want to curl it too much you just want the nail of the index finger down against that top card so this is called the right hand and grip now a lot of people when they start doing this they're kind of holding it up like this with the fingers all spread out try to rotate the hand down slightly to bring these fingers together so the cards are held like this now you need to put the cards back in to deal in grab so you're gonna take the deck and you're gonna align it with the base of the hand here just like before then these three fingers are going to up along this side and then the thumb comes are they index finger I should say it comes to the outer edge and the cards are back in dealing position and now you're just going to spend a few minutes doing this very simple exercise where you move the index finger down the thumb comes at the back three fingers at the front index finger curls at the top and you pick the deck up and then you put the cards back into dealing position in exactly the same way and really stop each time and make sure your grip is correct on the cards before going on now in terms of how you want to practice this in general imagine that your hands are submerged in a pot of honey you want to practice at that speed so you really want to do this at about this speed initially you just do this again and again just for a few minutes and you can slowly ramp up to it to a more workable speed one thing you should keep in mind about learning these grips is that even though it might seem kind of pedantic to an enforce such specific finger positioning at this early stage if you don't learn these grips correctly and then you try to learn another trick that uses a more advanced sleight of hand technique you'd have to go back essentially and relearn the grips just so that you could do the more advanced techniques so it really pays to learn the right the first time around and not have to unlearn bad habits later so the next thing to learn is how to spread cards between your hands how to have a card picked so here's what happens you start with the cards in left hand dealing position just like before so that means this edge goes against the base of the palm with the thumb at the side like this index finger at the other end three fingers along the side again the fingertips are just in line with the top card now you're going to take the thumb and you're going to start to push the cards over to the side you're gonna let the just a small group come over the tips of the fingers and you're gonna take these in the fork of the right thumb right here she's gonna take them in the fork of the right thumb gripping them by clamping them like this and then you're just gonna keep pushing little groups of cards over and these three fingers here at the left hand the second third and fourth fingers these fingers are going to extend slightly to let more and more cards come over and so what happens as you do this is as these fingers extend more and more and more you get to a point where all of your fingers are extended at under the cards and this is what lets you support the cards while they're spread apart like this if you find that they're tipping back or falling towards you you can take your pinkies and put them at the back like this just to kind of support them but you would still keep all three of your other fingers underneath the spread so once again they start a dealing position you use the thumb to push some cards over letting them kind of pass over these fingertips you clamp them in the fork of the right thumb and then you spread out the cards extending all your fingers underneath the spread of cards so you have an audience member take a card out so let's say they pick this one and then all you do to square the cards up is the reverse you just take the right hand cards and you just kind of shove them over here and all it's gonna happen is you're just going to now regrip everything in dealing grip and when you do that it's automatically squares up the cards in this direction and then you just take them an end grip by moving this finger down and then it automatically squares up the cards in this direction and if they're still a little unsquare you can kind of run your fingers along the sides just to be sure so now you're gonna let the look at this card and of course you wouldn't see it but just for the purposes of explanation it happens to be a tennis base but you would show them the card you make sure they remember it now why don't they look at the card you have to do something very simple all you have to do is look at the bottom card of the deck and this is really easy because everyone's watching this card and you can make a big deal about turning their back all you have to do is just kind of let your left hand tilt over like this and if you just let it tilt a little bit you'll be able to see the index of the bottom card right here you could also just pick the deck up and hand grip like this and just kind of look at the bottom card no one will be watching you at this point you'll just be turned away like this just take a quick look at the bottom card and put it back in your hand so in this case it's the 7 of Hearts and this is your key card now the key card principle is reliant on the fact that a deck of cards is actually like a closed loop and I'll show you what I mean by that in just a moment so the selected card is the ten of Spades our key card that we looked at on the bottom is the seven of Hearts you're going to cut some cards onto the table and all you do is you get the index finger out of the way it's like you're about to take the deck and end grip but you don't instead you just take the top half of the deck so your thumb comes in and it just kind of picks up about halfway through the deck and you just pick up those top cards and you put them on the table and you have the spectator put their card back here and then you drop the rest of these on top now you wouldn't show this card I'm just showing this for clarity so you can see that this is the seven of Hearts but again you would just take the rest of these and put them on top so what just happened is now the key card which is the seven of Hearts is right above the selected card which is the ten of Spades so your key card is right next to the selected card so even though you don't know the selected card you do know that it's right next to the key card on this side now here's what I mean now the key card principle is based off of the fact the detective cards is actually like a closed loop and when you give the cards a square cut or a straight cut like this which means you're just taking some cards from the top and putting them on the bottom like that all it does is it essentially turns the closed loop it's a cyclical order so here's what I mean I can give the deck any number of straight cuts like this as long as there's just a single straight cut and the key card will always be next to the selected card it doesn't matter how many times I cut the deck the seven of Hearts is here the ten of Spades is still right next to it if I give the cards another cut doesn't matter seven of Hearts and the ten of spades will still be next to each other now you might be wondering what happens if you were to cut the deck in between these two cards well then what happens is the seven would be on the bottom and the ten of Spades would be on the top but again the deck has a cyclical closed loop so they're still in a way right next to each other so if you ever see that your key card is on the bottom of the deck that just means the selected card is on the top and if you were to give the cards another cut well they would be right back next to each other somewhere in the middle so let's assume that this is the situation the cards have been cut many many times now what you're gonna do is you're gonna say I'm gonna take out a pair of cards why don't I take out the red sevens now all you do is you name the pair of cards that includes your key card so if my key card was the ace of hearts I would have said the raises if it was the five of clubs I would have sent the black fives but because the key part was a red seven because the red the key card was the in this case the seven of Hearts right that means I'm gonna say I'm gonna take out the red sevens I will give the deck a few more cuts just so I don't know for the purpose of explanation exactly where the odd part is gonna be in the deck so now what you're gonna do is you're gonna spread through the cards and look for the red signs but you need to spread through them with the cards up towards you like this so this is just like before you're pushing some cards over with your thumb into the fork of the right thumb like this but you're gonna keep your pinkies behind the cards like this below them and this is a this will help the cards not fall down so that's the only difference you keep everything else extended like this so but I will for the purposes of explanation turn the cards like this now there are two cases you can either come into the other red seven first in this case the seven of diamonds or you can come to your key card first it really doesn't matter so if you come to the other red seven you just take it out of the deck and then you keep spreading through and whenever you get to your key card and again you would be doing this up here because otherwise they'd see their selection but whenever you get to the key card all you do is you break the spread at that point so you're breaking the spread in between the key card and the selected card and you're doing it like this and you're giving the deck a cut which brings the key card to the face and the selected card to the back but you do that all right here and then you would just turn the deck like this and then take out the seven and put it on the table so what it looks like is that you just took out the two red sevens but in the process you controlled the selected card to the top of the deck so now that we have the two red sevens out on the table and the selected card on top we actually need to control the selected card to the bottom and it's helpful at this point to be able to shuffle the deck because we did just kind of look through all the cards so it might dispel some suspicion if we give the cards a shuffle now first I'm going to teach how to do the shuffle legitimately but then I will explain a small modification that allows us to control the card so just forget about the selected card for a moment here's the overhand shuffle I'll leave these out of the way you hold the cards in left hand dealing position and you're now going to tilt the hand up which means you take this hand and you tilt it up so that these fingernails point upwards and now you're gonna take the right thumb and bring it to the back of the deck but instead of going around the center you're gonna come mirror to the top near this corner right here and then the right middle finger will go at the outer edge like this so they're not in the center they're more towards this side and the index finger is just going to be on top now you're gonna take your left hand and your left thumb and you're gonna reach up and just tether to the edge right here just pull off a group of cards and then you just let these cards rest on these fingertips you don't hold them you don't take them in deal in position they rest along the crease of the hand right here and they just rest on these fingertips and you'll usually want to have your index finger kind of at the front so that you can mean the hand forward and have the cards not fall again they're not held they're just caged the thumb is away now what happens is the right hand comes back over and these cards stay here they do not get taken by the left hand they just stay in or that you're not going taken by the right hand they stay on the left hand and you take the left thumb and you bring it up to the top again and you pull off more cards like this and you'll notice as I pull off more cards they're just going on top of the cards that were already in this hand and then you do it again you reach up with the thumb and you pull off some more cards and then you pull off more cards and more cards until you just have a few and you throw them on top so once again you start in Geylang position you tilt the hand up like this right thumb at the back the middle finger at the front and all you're gonna do is take the left thumb pull off a small group of cards let them rest on the fingers like this again they're along the crease of the hand here with the index finger at the front the right hand comes over and you just pull off groups of cards more and more until you get to the very end and you throw the rest on top now I'm going to show you how to do what's called running cards and all that means is that as you give the cards an overhand shuffle like this at some point instead of having the thumb come up to the top of the cards just put the thumb on the back of a card and when you put the thumb on the back of the card you'll notice that you just pull the card off singly and this is just because of the friction of the thumb so if the thumb goes onto the back of the card you just pull off one card if it goes up to the very top you'll be able to pull off a group of cards and you can control this whenever you want to pull off one card you can just put the thumb on the back and run one card singly and whenever you want to pull off the group you just bring the thumb up to the top so that's all there is to it pulling off single cards or groups of cards now the way that we're going to use this is very simple because the selected card is the ten of Spades and I'll just move it back to the top because this is where it would be at this point all you're going to do is tilt the hand up like this take it into position for an overhand shuffle the left thumb comes to the back of this top card and you just pull off this top card singly on its own which is the selected card but they don't know that and then you just give the rest of the deck an overhand shuffle on top of it which means that card should now be on the bottom so once again the selected card was on top all you do is you till the hand up grip the deck for an overhand shuffle between your right thumb and the right middle finger and then the left thumb goes to the back of the top card pulls one card off and again it just rests here it does not get taken by this hand it just stays in this hand and then you just pull off groups of cards on top of it like this and now this moves the selected card to the bottom so once it's here just regrip the cards of dealing position and make sure no one sees the bottom card so now that the selected card has been controlled at the bottom of the deck it's time to do the little joke so you say something along the lines of well I'm gonna count to three and would you be impressed if when I reached number three your card materializes in between the two red sevens and of course they'll say yes that would be miracle so you say okay the instant I reach the number three your card will be in between the two red sevens so you count to three in fact you couldn't even have them count to three if you want to and as you're counting to three you just take one red seven and you just I'm holding them right now between my thumb and my fingers like this you can hold them however you want to it really doesn't matter all you do is you just take one of the sevens and you just use your left thumb to pull it onto the top of the deck face up and you just kind of square it up and then you just take the other seven and you just stick it on to the bottom and it can be helpful if you want to just kind of hold the deck with these three fingers you can get these two fingers out of the way and just slide it into the bottom and then you just push it in and when they get to three you say well your cards in between the sevens because there's one seven on the top of a deck and then you just spread the cards in between your hands like we learned before and there's every single card in the deck in between the top seven and the bottom seven which means your car is in between the two red sevens now they'll have to agree that that's the case but they usually won't be impressed so to actually find the card you do what's called a friction toss here's the friction toss we have one red seven on top we have another red seven on the bottom and the selected card the ten of Spades has been controlled to the bottom of the deck so here's what's gonna happen you're gonna take the deck into right hand and grip like this and you're now going to take the right left fingers the left fingertips here and you're going to pull the bottom card to the side just using friction you're just gonna pull the bottom card to the side in this case this is the face S seven of diamonds so you just reach under you pull this card over for about maybe a third of its width so this exposes some of this card but again you wouldn't show this the hand facedown like this and now you're going to regrip everything in the left hand here's how you're going to do it you want the pads of these fingers to be against the ten of Spades the pads of these fingers here against the ten of Spades the base of the palm contacts the seven of diamonds right here like this and then the left thumb contacts the very top seven so the only cards that are being contacted by your skin or the seven of Hearts the seven of diamonds and the ten of Spades everything else is basically free so if you turn your hand this way it's likely at a diagonal and you get your other hand ready to catch all you're going to do is you're going to keep pressure on these three cards but you're gonna slowly release pressure on all the rest of the cards and you'll find that at a certain point they all fall out into your hand except for the ten of Spades which will stay in between the two sevens now this may take you a few tries and that's okay but eventually you'll be able to get it so that again one read seven on top another on the bottom you use these four fingers and you pull this card to the side these fingers now go in contact with the actual selected card here the base of the poem contacts this card the thumb contacts this card and then you will just keep contact with these three cards but then slowly release pressure until the rest of the deck Falls now once you get good at that you can start to do it in a tossing motion and you just want kind of a sharp tossing motion I'll catch them in this hand and that card will stay behind and it will be in between the two red 7s and you say one card materializes in between the sevens and it should be your ten of Spades so I'll go through the friction toss just one more time one red seven on the top one red seven on the bottom you pull this card over with the fingers to the left these fingers go here in contact with the actual selected card the thumb is on top the base of the palm context this seven and then you are either going to tilt as you're learning it or just give the cards a sharp toss the only card that stays behind is the card that was in contact with these fingers which is of course going to be their selected card so that's the friction toss so now I'm gonna run through the entire trick again but I'll explain what I'm doing as I'm going along but I will go through it a little bit slower than of course I did it the original performance so start by having the cards shuffled by someone else and then take the cards back and hold them in the left hand dealing position again this means this side of the deck is against the base of your thumb and the thumb itself the index finger is at this edge and three fingers run along this side here and the tips of the fingers are in line with the top of the deck and there should be some space under the deck here so you're now going to spread the cards between your hands that means you take your left thumb and you're going to use it to push groups of cards over these fingertips which means you have to extend these fingertips a little bit and you're gonna take these in the fork of the right thumb and then you're gonna keep pushing cards over as you extend all of your fingers under the spread usually having their pinkies at the back can help stabilize everything you have a card picked and as they look at the card and as they memorize it all you do is you just look at whatever the bottom card is so in this case it happens to be the eight of Hearts but you know just because in the previous explanation the key card was a red seven why don't I use a different card let's say the two so let's imagine the key card is a black two this time just for variety safe so the key card is the two of spades and I would look at that as I turn away and in this case the selected card happens to be the six of Spades but again I wouldn't know that so you hold the deck and deal in position you are going to extend this finger under the deck like this and the right hand comes over as if you're about to take everything in and grip but you don't the right thumb just lifts up about half the deck from the back these three fingers come to the front and the index finger curls on top and you lift off about half the deck and you put about half the deck on the table they put their card back here and you drop the rest on top which means you are putting your key card the two of spades right on top of the selected card the six of spades they just don't know that you have a key card so now you asked if the audience members want squared and up and they can now you're gonna offer them the ability to cut the deck now the wording here is important I always say something like why don't you cut over some cards like it's done in a game and the reason I say that is because I don't want them to some start just giving the deck like multiple cuts like this because they can't do that that could actually ruin the trick and it wouldn't work but they don't know that so you need to create the impression that they have all the freedom in the world when they actually have a lot of restrictions that they just don't know about so what I say is could you cut over some cards like it's done in a game because that's really only the first half of the instruction that just means cut over a group of cards and then I say okay and then put the rest of the cards on top now they understand what cut the deck means so you can say and why don't you give the cards another cut just like before and they do it again and you can even have someone else if there happened to be more people Co isolating with you because why not you can even have someone else come up and give the cards a cut like this in another person company cards because remember a deck of cards is a closed cyclical loop and every time you give them parts a straight cut you're just turning the loop so once they've given the card some cuts you're going to say okay I'm gonna take out a pair of cards why don't I take out the two black twos now the reason I say black twos is because power key card is the two of spades which means I'm gonna say I'm going to take out the two black twos and then I say just to check your card wasn't a black tube was it now the reason you have to say this is because if their cart was a black two if they happen to pick the two of clubs then you can't really do the trick because I can't take out the two black twos and then find their card if their card use a black two but luckily this actually isn't the worst case scenario it's the best case scenario because when I say your card wasn't a black two was it if they say yeah it was I say concentrate on your car it was the two of clubs right you just read their mind because you've got very lucky so in other words when you say your card wasn't uh and you name the the cards you're about to take out if they say yeah was their card is the other one of the pair so in other words if your key card was the three of diamonds then their card must have been the three of Hearts if your key card was the nine of Spades their card was the nine of clubs if your key card was the ten of diamonds their card is the ten of Hearts and so on and so forth that will happen very rarely but it's wonderful when it does happen so now you're going to turn the cards face up and you're going to begin to spread through them like this but you're gonna do it up here with the pinkies below the cards but just for the purposes of explanation I will spread through down here now as we look through the cards there are two scenarios you can come to your key card first or the other black two um so in this case let's see ah here it is the two of spades a key card so when you hit your key card you break the spread between the key card and the one above it which is their card and then you cut the cards at this point for me their card to the top of the deck but of course you do this up here so that you can then bring the hands down and put this card on at the table then you spread through the cards again up here and I look for now the two of clubs and then when I get to the two clubs I just put the two of clubs on the table but I keep everything else in the same order so that their card is still on top of the deck now you turn everything facedown and you're gonna give the cards an overhand shuffle so holding everything in dealing grip you tilt the hand up your right thumb comes to the back the right middle finger comes to the front edge but they're not in the centres they're nearer the top index finger goes along the top edge here and you take your left thumb and you just put it on the back of this top card and you pull out a single card letting it rest against these fingers with the index finger at the outer edge and then you just shuffle cards directly on top of it so that their card and it's up on the bottom now again you don't show that keep the cards facedown and you square them up in dealing position now you do the little one-two-three joke you take the dis card and put it on top you take the other two and you put it on the bottom face-up now when you explain that your card well it is between the two black 2s you spread the cards between your hands like this just to show that the whole deck is in between the twos now you hold everything in dealing position regrip the entire deck and end grip which means you need to get this finger out of the way thumb comes at the back three fingers at the front index finger curls on top like this and now you take the pads of these fingers and you use them to drag this card but of course holding it down like this to the left for about a third to half of its width the pads of these fingers now go in contact with the selected card right here the base of the hand is in contact with this card and the left thumb is in contact with the face card now all you do is a sharp toss one card remains in between the two black twos and indeed it is their selected card the six of Spades you should go through the explanation again and you should look at each individual technique and practice it for a few minutes just to get the feeling the muscle memory in your hands and after you've done that you can then start to work on stringing the various parts of the trick together until you can do the whole thing for memory you'll definitely want to practice if you have a mirror or video camera by using that so you can see what everything looks like in your hands and once you feel confident in that you don't remember all the steps and that you can do two shuffles deceptively you can nail the friction toss then you also have to think a little bit about what you're going to say if so that you're not you know stumbling over your words the whole time and that takes practice but that's what friends and family are for you can show them tricks when they're in their early stages and they are usually kind and forgiving audience members and they can give you great feedback as well so I hope you enjoyed learning a magic trick while we're all stuck inside for a little while I think during times of stress and hardship this is where entertainment really shines and it's certainly fun to watch people do magic tricks but I think it's much more fun to actually learn them yourself and to be able to give that really lovely experience of like oh my god how did you do that that feeling of wonder to other people so hopefully this will take your mind off world events for a little while and we can all share in some much-needed figuratively and literally magic thanks so much

Channel: Daniel Roy

Views: 695,063

Keywords: magic, sleight of hand, daniel, roy, magic castle, theory, art, business, think like a magician, cards, card tricks, daniel roy, card magic, magician, card cheating, cheating, erdnase, center deal, bottom deal, second deal, riffle stacking, dai vernon, three card monte, canada bill, storytelling, greek deal, stacking the deck, false cut, Michael Vincent, Simon Aronson, Darwin Ortiz, Ricky Jay, Juan Tamariz, Steve Forte, walter irving scott, S.W. Erdnase, how to do magic tricks?

Id: ftdG2IcxQe0

Length: 32min 50sec (1970 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020