How to Spread & Turnover a Deck of Playing Cards

Video Transcript

Hi! My name is Chris McKay with Expert Village.com. I am going to show you right now how to spread and turnover the playing cards. If you would like to learn more about my work as a magician in Cleveland and Los Angeles or book a show, you can check on my website at www.mckaymagic.com. Okay, so this is what a spread looks like; pretty basic you can do it face up if you want to show the entire deck. You can see all the numbers and all the suits, that’s what a turnover looks like. Both of them are pretty easy but they require a few conditions. First of all, to do a good spread you want to have a relatively new deck of cards with a nice finish on them because this creates just the right amount of friction and the cards practically do it themselves if you got a brand new deck. If you are doing the turnover, you want to do it on not a smooth surface but kind of a carpet or tablecloth or this is a clothes up mat which is kind of just like a felt surface and I will get to the reason for that in a second but anyway a spread can be done pretty much anywhere and you are basically… you are regulating the amount of cards and the space between the cards with the tip of your pointer finger and I am just running the pointer finger ever so slightly up the side of the cards as I spread to allow more cards to go through. Now it’s practically self working. I just put the cards there and just pull with my hand. Do you see how they just spread naturally; it’s because of just the way that the cards are designed and the finish on them. Its just they will naturally spread pretty easily. So the newer the deck is the easier is to practice this. So get on a new deck and just try this couple of times and it’s a little bit of a knack but it’s pretty easy to get down. Now the turnover is much easier, all you’re doing is after you’ve got a nice tight spread you’re just going to turnover the end card, you don’t want to turnover this card that doesn’t do anything. Turnover this card and it sends a chain reaction down to the other side turning over all the cards. In fact if you really want to be a showoff, you can turn it over and then grab this peak right here with your finger and now you can control where it goes and go back and forth with it. Like I said you want to do this on sort of a surface that has some friction to it because when you turnover the cards, I mean what’s happening right now is there are cards that are at a very steep angle in here, like this one right here. These cards are at a very steep angle and if this was like a frictionless surface, that card would tend to want to just slide but right now because of the way the cards are stacked they are digging into the side of this felt and it’s keeping them balanced so you can practically just leave the cards like that forever if you want. But of course I mean if you go to a table that’s got glass on it or just a nice finish like just nice finished wood. if you turn it over quickly like that it will still work just because it’s so fast. So that’s the spread and a turnover.

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