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Hi, I’m Mike Patrick from mikepatrickmagic.com. You can also find me on Facebook by typing Mike Patrick magic. It’s pretty simple.

I’ve been doing magic for about 12 years, and I’ve been a professional for the last eight. I specialize in doing full magic shows. I also do walk around magic for weddings and stuff, but most of what I do is doing shows for groups of as small as five, but up to, like, 30, 40, 50 people in their homes or apartments. A lot of apartments in NYC. But I do it for a group of their friends, and I do about an hours worth of magic. That’s a full magic show of the best stuff I’ve done.

I’ve always liked magic. I remember watching David Copperfield TV specials when I was kid. I remember being really excited because Wayne Gretzky was going to be on it. He was on a cartoon that I used to like a lot.

He borrowed Wayne Gretzky’s baseball card, the most valuable card in the world, and tore it in to tiny little pieces and put it back together, one piece at a time. And, whenever I thought about magic tricks, for the rest of my life, I always thought of that one time, when he took that baseball card, and just put it right back together. That was what was magic for me. I really like magic because, I feel as though if you create the best sequence of magic, people will see something they’ve never seen before. When they’re on the edge of their seat, and they think that everything is over, and I still do, like, three or four things in a row that completely fry them, I know that I will get them to the level where they just can’t handle it. They just completely fall apart, and, then, they experience magic. Because, that’s what it is. Magic is when nothing makes sense anymore, and everything seems perfect. It’s special effects in real life.

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Hi, I’m Mike Patrick, and this is how to make a coin vanish. You take the coin, you blow, and the coin disappears and reappears like this. It can also go into this elbow and come out of here, and that’s how you make a coin vanish. What happens is these fingers are here. The coin comes into the hand. As the coin approaches, what you’re simulating is taking the coin like this. What’s actually going to occur is the thumb releases its grip and the coin, when I do it, it almost pivots like this. So when the coin goes into the hand, when these fingers screen, when these fingers touch each other, that’s when it comes inside, and then your hand closes like this.

Disappears like that. It’s important that you don’t pull this hand away or do anything too suspicious. You don’t have to do this really quickly or anything. If you do it really fast, people will think you did something sneaky. You can do this, relatively speaking, pretty slowly, and it still looks really good. You can make the coin disappear like this. You can make it go into an elbow, come out of another one, however you’d like to do it. The possibilities are almost endless. You can make this disappear and appear beside someone’s ear, go behind your knee, whatever you would like to do. And that is how to make a coin vanish.

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Hi, I’m Mike Patrick and this is how to do the Coin Through Handkerchief trick. Place the coin in the handkerchief, blow, and you can actually massage it, getting it to go all the way through the handkerchief. I’ll do that one more time. You can take the coin, place it inside, and immediately pull it right through. What you do is much like in the other video where we learned how to vanish a coin. You do that exact same thing. You do the coin vanish, which I explained.

You turn your hand over so now you have the coin secretly in this hand. So after you do that, you go like this, pretend to put it in this hand. You turn your hand over, and then you place your thumb on the back. So this gives us this kind of condition. They think that the coin is inside, and when you pull, it looks like it penetrates the handkerchief. Now you can place this away and go into any number of other coin tricks that you might know. That’s how you do the coin through handkerchief.

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Hi, I’m Mike Patrick, and this is how to do the String and Straw Trick. You have a string and you place it through the straw. Take a pair of scissors and I cut straight through the middle of the straw. And somehow with a blow the string stays in one piece. That’s the String and Straw Trick. This is how it works. And this is how you prepare a straw.

You take a straw and you can take an X-ACTO knife. If you’re a kid, make sure that you get your parents to help you with this. But somewhere in the middle of the straw you will make a slit. So I just go straight along the edge here. And it’s best if the straw has some kind of design or is a thick straw. Straws that are very long are great.

This is not the best, but this will work. You place the string through it. You get it to go all the way through. And then you get the slit, make sure the audience does not see the slit. You can show that this goes through both sides. And when you bend the straw, you cover the entire thing with your hand for a second. You pull straight down. What this does is it causes the string to go through the slit and effectively out of the straw at that top part. You cover the part with the string with your fingers.

This works better if you have a larger straw. And you take your scissors. And don’t cut through the string ‘cuz that’ll destroy the end of the trick but you cut right through the straw. They can see that it goes into two pieces. You bring it back together. Blow. And then by pulling straight up, it looks like the string has restored itself. That is the classic String and Straw Trick.

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Hi. I’m Mike Patrick and this is how to make a cigarette disappear. I’ll show you two different ways of doing this.

One, is to take the cigarette. Make it vanish and reappear like this. And the other one is to take the cigarette burn on the floor and you can immediately get it back like this. These are two slightly different techniques. What you would do is you have the cigarette and you’re going to essentially do this kind of action as you take it into your other hand. As soon as this hand screens the cigarette, you allow the thumb, the middle finger is going to pull in and it pivots around the thumb like this. When this goes like this, disappears and in the continuing action you can bring this hand to your mouth and make the cigarette reappear. You can do this while it’s lit to makes it a little bit more impressive. Make sure you don’t hit your head and burn yourself. Cigarettes are extremely hot.

Disappears. Reappears like this. The other way, and when you’re throwing on the floor, and you don’t actually throw the cigarette on the floor, what you do is you hold it as if you’re holding a cigarette normally in between the index and middle fingers. You come in, and almost like a thimble vanish, you clip the tail end of the cigarette with your thumb and you open your hand like this. But you do it as you throw the cigarette. So, you apparently throw it on the ground. Step.

Then you can immediately simply reach back in and reclip the cigarette and make it reappear. This is very easy to do while it’s lit and makes the most sense because why else would you step a cigarette out. You do this, throw on the ground, stomp on it, reproduce, and continue on with whatever you were doing. Those are two ways of making a cigarette vanish and reappear.

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Hi. I’m Mike Patrick, and this is how to do the classic Cups And Balls Trick.

You have three balls and three cups. You place one of the balls onto the center cup, stack and then snap, and then one of the balls magically goes through the cups.

I can do it again. I place this ball on top. Give it a snap of the fingers and the ball goes right through. It happens every single time whether you want it to or not.

And that’s the classic Cups And Balls Trick.

Now this is a very fancy set of cups, but you can do it with any cups. If you have coffee cups that you can get from Starbucks, you can do it with Starbucks cups and some napkins. That’s probably the best way of doing it, because you can just do it in front of your friends, impromptu. It’s the easiest method.

You need three balls. Actually more specifically, you need four balls. The fourth ball is secret. They never get to know about this. The fourth ball is put in the middle cup. So if you have three cups, you should have cup A, nothing, cup B, that’s the ball inside, and then cup C goes on the bottom of this. If you hold the cups in your hand like this, they can see the mouth of this cup, and by grabbing the bottommost cup, you rotate it towards yourself and you put it down.

The second cup actually has a ball inside of it, so you don’t want to do this, because they’ll see the ball. What you do is, again, you rotate it towards yourself, and you do it quickly enough, not fast, but enough so the ball doesn’t fall out before the cup hits the table. You place this down.

This is essentially what you’re going to be doing over and over again. So what you do, is you place this ball on top, you stack them on top, snap your fingers and show that the ball has apparently went through the cup. You do the exact same thing. Re-stack the cups. Place them in a line. Now there are two balls under this cup. When you place this on top, snap, goes through, and then finally you do it one more time, and that makes all three balls go through.

And that is how you do the classic Cups And Balls Trick.

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Hi. I’m Mike Patrick and this how to do the jumping thimble trick. It uses 2 thimbles.

If you watch the vanish the thimble, it’s essentially this: you’re holding it and it goes into thumb palm, like so and it comes out except you’re doing this in both hands. You got to learn how to do this and you’re going to time it so that they vanish once, you’re going to have one visible while your other hand is open and when you come down and hit here, you’re going to pull this finger into the thimble and extend this one as you take this off.

So you’re taking off as you’re putting the other one on. And it looks like it jumps through your elbow and through your body. You can do it as you cross your hand like this and there’s a variety of ways of doing it and you can use it to make more thimbles as you go into a further thimble routine. But that is the basics on how to do the jumping thimble trick, just like this.

Going again into detail, you go down into here, going forward so simply your thumb catches this, moves forward and moves back in. Do this in front of the mirror to get some rhythm going and when you can do this you’ll be able to move on into thimble work.

What’s nice about this is that if you have a bunch of other thimbles, you can put those on your finger and since you’re not actually showing your hand empty, you can make the thimble jump a few times and make a whole bunch of thimbles appear if you do this. You simply need to have other thimbles on your fingers and keep your hand close and you can still do the thumb palm the same way.

And that’s how you do the jumping thimble trick.

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Hi, I’m Mike Patrick, and this is how to make a thimble vanish and come back. The way you do this, is you’re going to use something called a thumb palm. So, this is the basic technique, your finger curls in, your thumb goes over it, and your finger is removed. Practice doing this action a bunch of times, so that the thimble is completely concealed and your thumb is holding it securely.

What you’re going to do, is your going to bring you other hand over top, like this, and, as soon as this hand screens this finger curls in and does this as it looks like you pulled the thimble off. Relax this hand against the… keep it in a palm like this. I blow on it and make it disappear. I extend my finger again, and as I curl over it I bring it in. I do this. So, as I come over here I do the same thing. I squeeze, and I open up my fingers one at a time and make it reappear.

So, in speed, I come over. Pull it off. Whoof. It disappears. I extend my finger. I come over. I squeeze, and it reappears. And, that’s how to make a thimble vanish and reappear.

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Hi. I’m Mike Patrick and this is how to do the disappearing handkerchief trick. You take a handkerchief. You place it into your hand. You snap your fingers and it disappears, completely. You can see that there’s nothing in hand, but if I just give it a wave the handkerchief comes back and there’s nothing else. The way this works is that you have a thumb tip. You can get at any magic shop. This is a fake thumb. This one fits very well. They make them in kids’ sizes and for adults and several other sizes. You’ll be able to find one that will fit you. You can get them in kid sizes, adult sizes or other ones for other tricks.

This is the right size for me. This goes on your thumb. To begin with, I take out the handkerchief and the thumb tip is hidden behind the silk. If I have it in this kind of condition you don’t get to see the thumb tip. A lot of times, people try to hide this by moving very quickly. If you notice I don’t move very quickly in a streak. The slower you move, the more effective it will be. I show it very cleanly like this, and when I go to put this into my hand I simply slip the thumb tip off into my hand as I start poking it in. I use a variety of my fingers, my thumb, and my other fingers to push this in for the following reason. A lot of times when you see this trick done you’ll see people do this. That isn’t good because if they know what a thumb tip is they will immediately see you do this and they’ll know right away. What you want to do is you poke it into your hand; you put the thumb tip on and then you keep pushing an imaginary silk into your hand.

This part’s important because now you’ve gotten rid of it but they think that it’s still here because why would you poke it if it’s not there? You can stab your fingers with the thumb tip. It sounds exactly the same, so you should do that. If you can stab your fingers, boom, you show it disappears. Usually, they’ll do this. What I do is I simply brush my hand, keeping the thumb tip underneath these fingers.

This is why they can’t see the fake thumb. Even if the color’s a little bit off and you think, “Oh, this isn’t the same shape as my skin”, it doesn’t make any difference because they don’t get to see it. When I come up here, I flash briefly. Make sure you point the thumb tip at their eyes. If you point it at their eyes they can’t tell the difference between the length of your fingers and they can’t the seam and they won’t be able to tell the colors. So, I just do this for a second. I come back. I brush my hand. When I turn my hand over I wave this hand, taking thumb tip off into here. It just rotates off to the thumb, removes it as I wave. I remove the silk and as I bring my hands together to straighten it out I just jam the thumb tip right back on and I extend it this way. And that is how you do the disappearing handkerchief.

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Hi, I’m Mike Patrick, and this is how to do the instant knot trick. You simply take the rope and you toss. Sorry, you’re supposed to snap your fingers. And then you get the knot to appear inside of the rope. The way this works is you tie a knot in advance at one end of the rope. You place this into your hand like this, and when you take the rope out, the knot is concealed.

You say, “I’m going to try to tie a knot with my hand like this.” You simply grab it, you hold it between the index and thumb, and you toss it down once, twice, and on the third time when you do it, you maintain this grip and you let go with the rest of your hand, and it looks like this knot just appeared and like you tied it. So in real time, it goes one, two, and then if you snap that adds the visual element and it makes the knot appear. And they can untie it and see that it was a real knot. And that’s how you do the appearing knot trick.

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Hi, I’m Mike Patrick, and this is how to do a top of the fist sponge ball vanish. You simply place the ball into the hand, blow, and it disappears. It’s over here. The way is works is you place the hand on top and your going to simulate pushing this into your hand. What I do, is I just place this here, and I just cover it, I more or less just, mash it with my hand as if I’m just pushing it in very caveman style, if you will. But, I just clip it with my thumb like this. So, when I go like this, boop, sometimes you’ll want to push it with another finger just to make it look like it goes in all the way, and you can make it disappear. There are alternative vanishes.

There are a lot of different ways of doing it. But, in certain contexts, this works really well. The way I usually use it, I have a bigger ball for this, is I would take a sponge ball. I go like this, and it becomes a larger sponge ball. This is pretty subtle. I usually get one that’s about three or four inches long, but you can use this to make it turn in to any object. Let me see here. Like, for example, if I had a ball, I could go like this and then it turns in to a handkerchief.

So, all you do is you would have the object you wish it to change in to in your hand to begin with, and, the beauty of the top of the fist vanish, is that you don’t need to open your hand like in a normal vanish. Like this. This hand stays closed. So, you simply place the ball on top of your hand, pretend to put it inside, blow, and then, it changes in to anything that you want it to. That’s the top of the fist vanish.

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Hi, I’m Mike Patrick, and this is How to make a Sponge ball Vanish. You take the ball and it disappears. You make it reappear like this and there are a lot of other ways to do it. You can also put it in this elbow and take it out of this elbow, and these all use the same basic technique. What happens is you have two ways. I’ll teach the easy way first and then a slightly more advanced but still really simple method. The easiest way of doing it is to place your thumb on top of this and as you open your other hand you place this ball like this and as soon as these fingers touch these fingers, you’re going to pull this hand away and then you’re going to make it disappear. It’s important that you don’t just do this. You go… and then it’s gone, because it doesn’t really feel like it disappeared. It feels like you took it away. You need to do something to make it look like magic like blow on it. Like you go like this… and then it disappears.

It makes a lot stronger this way. So the technique is that you put your thumb on top, you place this in the hand, as soon as these fingers touch is when your hand retreats, blow, and then it disappears. The other method looks a little bit like, this is what that would look like. This looks a little bit better… disappears. What this is, is I sort of roll the ball. I have the finger at the top, the thumb, and when I’m moving it back I move the thumb back and I close this hand around it. So same kind of idea. As soon as this gets out of their sight line and these fingers are closing you’re going to move the hand out of the way. I think this looks awfully good, doing it like this… disappears. Here are some other ways that you can use it very briefly. You can take the ball, put it in this elbow, take it out, place it into the pocket and make it reappear, and then if you take the ball you can make two of them.

So you would simply have another sponge ball in your pocket. You make this one appear, pull it out of someone’s ear, whatever you want to do. Just hide it in your hand or pull it out of their head. You make the ball go into your elbow, so you just fake, you do this, pretend to take it out of your elbow, take it out of this hand. Now you’ll learn how to do the move in your left hand too. If you can do it ambidextrously, you can do even more tricks. So I pretend to put it in this pocket, I just make it come back again, and I take a ball secretly from this pocket, and then I can just come up here and pull them apart. If you want to make it a little more deceptive than that, you just put your thumb on top and you change hands, almost like you’re making it disappear but you have two objects. And then you simply go up to it and pull them apart. That’s how you make a sponge ball vanish and a few other things.

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Hi, I’m Mike Patrick and this is how to do an overhand lift style shuffle. What it looks like is this. But it’s a bit more sneaky than that. Because, for example, if I have the three of diamonds, I have no other three of diamonds in this deck. But if I shuffle the cards, I can still maintain control over the three of diamonds.

How this works, is that when you take that. First, you need to be really good at an overhand shuffle first. So make sure that you’re very comfortable with shuffling the cards like this. Because otherwise this will not look any good at all, people will figure it out.

So what you do is you take off a block of cards, about ten cards or so. And their card, or whatever you wish to control, whether it’s the aces or whatever, that’s on top of the deck. When you go to do the second chop of the shuffle, you are going to pick this up with the other fingers behind. So it’s going to be this kind of action. And you’re going to continue the shuffle on until you reach that gap. You drop everything above it, and then drop those cards.

I’ll do it with the cards face up like this, with the five of spades as the top of the deck. If I shuffle off the first packet, that goes behind the others as I continue the shuffling action. As per usual, I reach the break and I drop everything on top of it. So from behind, you can see it like this. And you should have the shuffle be a very smooth, consistent action. You can do this a few times in a row and maintain the same shuffle. That is how you do a lift shuffle.

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Hi, I’m Mike Patrick and this is how to do a thumb cut. A thumb cut looks like this. It’s easier to do with half the deck. I can do it with an entire deck, but you’re going to have to have awfully large hands and stretch a whole lot to do it this way.

So I recommend that you start with half the deck. What you’re going to do is you’re going to place your thumb over the deck, you’re going to stretch and try to catch this entire packet in your hand like that. The middle finger is going to reach in and your other fingers are curled underneath like this. So you have your middle finger going in between the packets and all the other fingers supporting from underneath.

You’re going to extend these fingers like so, and then your thumb drops and these come back in. So once again, the thumb comes over, the middle finger pulls the packet off of the thumb, and the other fingers support it as you cut it forward and back on top like this. One more time. You can do this in both hands, and you can do this in conjunction with the one-handed shuffle like this to create a very nice closer for the cut. So that is the thumb cut.

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Hi. I’m Mike Patrick and this is how to do a one-handed shuffle. It looks like this. You take the cards and shuffle them with one hand like this. The grip is a little bit unusual. You have three fingers on one end of the deck and your pinky and thumb on the other side. So, if I remove the deck, it’s like this and if I place the deck back it’s around here. What you’re going to do is divide approximately, and you want this to be relatively exact, you want to get half the deck to break off with your thumb. I lift up with my thumb here. These two fingers let go let go at this point. I’m going to move my thumb counterclockwise, pivoting along the index finger and this packet is going to move clockwise. This is what it’s going to look like. These two move at the same rate until they’re here.

The two outer fingers now regroup this edge and pull it so that they are even with each other. It’s a very slight adjustment when this happens, about a quarter of an inch, depending on your hand size. You then take the two back portions and you shuffle those together with even pressure from your thumb. This is going to take the most work. One more time, you have the pinky here and the thumb. You break upwards with your thumb. Your fingers move out of the way. It pivots around the index finger so they swirl on opposite directions. I reapply those two fingers, aligning the packets. And now I place those together and I cause them to weave at an angle. So now I should have sort of a V from my perspective. Now the cards are ready to be bridged. I turn them over.

I apply pressure like in a normal shuffle and I let go of them. They will fall over the floor when you try to do this. It’s unavoidable but eventually you can use your hand or cradle if you feel more comfortable. But eventually over time you should just be able to do it in the air like this. I’ll go over it really slowly one more time. The pinky is here towards this pip on that side. The thumb breaks the packet. I remove these fingers and I pivot this across. They’re aligned with each other. These cards get farrowed the other cards and then I turn over and I shuffle them like this. Here’s one quick variation that I can show you that I do. You can cut off about a third of the deck. If you do that, when these cards are in this orientation you can use your index finger to move this packet forward so this just pivots along these, goes into this hand, and you do a thumb cut so your thumb comes over. This opens up. And you can shuffle these into each other. This is going like this. And then you close. You see that in speed it looks like this. And that is how to do a one-handed shuffle.

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Hi. I’m Mike Patrick and this how to do an arm spread.

It looks like this. You would spread the cards along the arm. You can turn them over and you can re-assemble them like this. You can also throw them in mid-air and catch them depending on how excited you’ll feel that day. But the trick is a little different from if you’re normally spreading cards on a table, for example.

So I hold the cards with my thumb at the back here and my other fingers on the top, bevel the cards. You’re going to hold this card as flat as you can, you’re going to bevel these cards so that there’s an angle going in the front towards you. You’re going to apply even pressure as you spread along your arm.

Now this, for example, is not so great. I tried doing this a little slowly and what happens is if you get a big gap in the spread like, say for example, this, when I try to turn the cards over, it’s not going to succeed. You need to make sure that it gets very consistent even spread if you want them to turn over properly.

So you take the cards, you spread them along the arm by moving your fingers towards you. This will cause the entire spread to turn over. If you do it quickly it’s much easier. And if you use your thumb underneath, you just move forward and you can re-square the cards.

So you spread the cards, flip them over and simply scoop them back up like this. Give the cards a spread, flip them over and simply reassemble like this. So you spread, flip, come back.

The more even your spread is, the better the arm spread will look.

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Hi, I’m Mike Patrick, and this is how to do a boomerang toss. What you’re going to do is, it’s very much like holding a card for regular throwing. I always, when I’m doing this type of boomerang toss, I always clip the card from this corner, and I have it in here. You’re going to do the same action as if you were to throw a card normally, except you’re going to tilt in a little bit more. This gives the card a little bit more. You want it to spin in a space almost, so when you let go when you first start doing it, before you start trying to throw it far away from you, try to get used to keeping the card in a small space, like right here.

Once you get used to doing this, you can go further and further away, and it’s really the jerking back action of the hand while combining it with the wrist. It’s almost like whipping. So, you do this, and you can cause the card to catch in the middle of the deck. If someone picked a card, you could do a trick where you find it like this. So this has a variety of uses. Also it just looks pretty cool if you can throw the card and make it come right back to you. You can get some substantial distance. Good luck.

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Hi. I’m Mike Patrick, and this is how to do the very famous ‘card spring’. There are a lot of different ways of doing this. I’m going to show you the best method. I recommend that you learn doing this way. I’ll show you the incorrect ways very briefly and quickly.

Two different ways of doing it is you would normally hold your thumb at the back and at the front, and you would let them either shoot off of your fingers or shoot off of your thumb. These, you don’t have the most control over the cards. They’ll work and they’re effective, but the best way of doing it is more like this. What’s happening here is that the cards are being gripped in this fashion. You have your thumb at the lower left corner and basically the area in between your ring finger and your pinky, that’s on the edge together. So you should hold the deck, more or less, like this. These fingers aren’t really doing much. And you’re going to work on, you’re shooing them off both of them
simultaneously. So you’re not just doing your thumb, and you’re not just doing these fingers. That being said, when you start practicing this, you’re going to do it off one at a time, so you get the ability to do both at the same time.

So when you start practicing, this is your grip. You have your two fingers here and your finger here. Just practice, just really close to your hand too. Getting them to shoot off of your fingers. Don’t let it go off your thumb at all. Just allow it to go off of your fingers like this. Then, once you’re a little bit comfortable with that, you’re going to take your thumb and you’re going to allow it to shoot of your thumb like this. You’re going to do this a bunch of times until you get the hang of it. Eventually, when you can do both of those you’re going to marry them and then you’re going to be able to get your spring. The reason this is so important is because instead of the cards shooting in one direction, either forward or backwards off your thumb or your fingers, it’s shooting off of both. So it’s shooting in a straight line. The straighter the line is, the easier it is to go very far away with your spring. So instead of being able to just do a really tight spring, you can go much much further away, as you go farther.

And you’ll get more confident over time. With a brand new deck, this is very difficult because of the fact that the cards are extremely stiff. So the more broken in they get, and the more bent, it’s going to be better. That being said, you don’t want to do too many springs in a row because then your deck is going to look like this.

To correct this, you have two options. You can either, simply do this, or, almost better, especially when breaking in a new deck, is to simply turn over the deck and spring it in the opposite direction.

When breaking in a deck of cards, it’s a good idea to spring it a few times this way, and a few times this way, and do a few general shuffles, which will allow the cards to be more conditioned for your spring.

And that is how you do a ‘card spring’.

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Hi. My name is Mike Patrick, and this is how to do a quadruple cut. It looks like this. This is based off charlier cut and the triple cut, so you should learn those first. But what you’re going to do is allow a small packet, about a third to a quarter of the deck to fall. You’re going to kick that beyond your thumb. You’re going to grip it, and then you’re going to allow this packet to fall. Now unlike a triple cut, which I’ll do that for you really quickly.

A triple cut would look like this. A quadruple cut, instead of allowing that packet to fall entirely, you’re going to take that second packet and keep that separation with the thumb right there and allow that packet to fall back on top. So the first action will be like this. You do essentially a triple cut. Allow this to fall. Your index finger kicks this back up, so you’re going to allow this to tilt along with gravity, and you’re going to allow that to fall back in. Your thumb regrips, and you bring another packet of cards. Allow it to fall, releasing pressure with the thumb, and bring it back up again. Throughout the cut, it’s a good idea if you keep your pinky at the back, because this will keep everything square, once again as I had mentioned in the other videos. So you’re going to grip with your thumb, starting at the beginning.

You kick the cards back, grip with the thumb. You allow a second packet to fall up and over. You lever this packet back up, allowing the thumb packet to fall. Regrip with your thumb. Allow a few more cards to fall, and then bring this back over the top. If you wish to put this into other combinations, if you learn other cuts, you can make it look something like this, where you can do the standard cut.

You can throw in a revolution style cut, and maybe a flip over sort of action. So you can use this as a combination for a variety of cuts, but this is the basic framework for creating your own things. That is the quadruple cut.

Transcript

Hi. I’m Mike Patrick, and I’m going to teach you how to do a charlier cut. First you go into straddle grip. That means that you have your index finger on one end, your little finger on the opposite end. Your two fingers should be over here, and your thumb is there. The grip looks like this. It’s very secure.

And what you’re going to do for the charlier cut, you have two ways of going into it. You can release pressure with your thumb, and then you bring your index finger in the front, and you’re going to kick it up. So at speed it looks like this. It’s important to keep your pinky at the back. The reason why it’s so important is that it will hold the packet stable. If I don’t have my pinky there, it’s more liable to fall like this or maybe like that, and if you did a few of them in a row, you’d start having this mess. Whereas if you keep your pinky in position, you can use gravity to help you maintain a square deck. It looks much better this way.

So every time you come down, you’re going to release the cards from your thumb, and then you’re index finger is going to simply kick this packet up until your thumb can get out of the way. It clears, and then you let go, and it falls down and collapses with itself. The alternative, which gives you a little bit more control over how many cards you take off of the packet, is to take that index finger and use it to literally pull a packet down and then kick it up. This allows you to take a small packet, if you’re doing a triple cut variation, or you can take a larger packet, or you can just control it so that it’s a perfect even packet. A lot of the time, I just usually use the falling method, using pressure.

It’s entirely up to you, and it really is on the context of what you’re using it for. But that is how you do a charlier cut.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Mike Patrick, and this is How you do the Butterfly Cut. The action begins with two one-handed Charlier cuts. So you’re going to go into straddle grip as we discussed in that video. I will pivot the cards like this, break it with my thumb and I allow my index finger to go underneath as I get into straddle grip with my other hand. I do two simultaneous one-handed Charlier cuts. There’s a slight difference though. When you divide them and you do the one-handed cuts, after you clear you’re going to jam your index fingers back in dividing those packets like so. Your other fingers curl over the top of it, and your left hand goes first followed pretty much at the same time by your right hand, and you get those as square as you can so now you’re in this kind of condition.

You allow this packet to roll forward, so you’re going to move your middle fingers over the top and you’re going to move the left hand packet forward and your right hand packet over, and then you bring this one back pulling the index fingers towards you. Doing this slow results in the cards getting a little bit off-skew, but what you’re going to do is you’re going to aim for getting these as tight as you can. Like if you just put them together for example like this, your end result isn’t going to be very pretty. So you try to get everything as square as you can all the way through the cut, very important. So you get into straddle grip with both hands, do your one-handed Charliers, insert your index fingers, and then you put them into each other, move them forward again rolling the middle fingers over, moving these packets in one at a time using your thumbs, and then rolling this backwards. Then you just place them face down.

Here’s another quick tip. If you start with the cards in your right hand and you pivot them in this direction, the top and bottom stock, meaning the top 10 to 13 cards and the bottom 13 cards will stay the same. So if I do the cut with the five of clubs face-up, if I do it out of my left hand you’ll see that that five of clubs ends up somewhere in the deck; however, if I do it with the right hand starting when I have the Ace of hearts face-up on top, the Ace of hearts ends on top of the deck just like the other one. So if you’re doing a card trick where you need the card to stay on top or bottom, this is a great way to handle it.

Again, going through it one more time. Do the one-handed Charlier cuts, put your fingers inside, roll them into each other, roll them forward, move these in, and come back, square up, turn the deck over, and that is how you do the butterfly cut.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Mike Patrick, and this is how to do a triple cut. Looks like this. The action is very similar to a Charlier Cut, do not attempt to do this unless you do a Charlier Cut first. The action, you get into again the straddle grip like we’ve described before, that’s the index finger on top, pinky at the back, these two fingers on the side, thumb on the side. You’re going to let approximately a third of the deck go. And there are two ways to approach this. One is if you have smaller hands, one is if you have larger hands. Sometimes, hand size is subjective, so usually people that have hands that are large enough to do it, simply aren’t flexible enough to do it, and they aren’t holding the cards in the right area. So keep trying, see if it can work for you. I’ll show you the first way.

The first way is if you cut the cards, allow them to go like this, and then do this. The second method looks a little bit different. You do it like so. Subtle differences but I’ll explain what they are. You’re going to cut off a third of the deck and you’re going to push them underneath your thumb. So that should be able to just hit right away. And then you’re going to allow your thumb to release a smaller packet and you’re going to cut both of those up like a standard Charlier Cut. So again, you let a portion of the cards go.

Grip them underneath the thumb. Let the rest of the cards go, and they go on top. The other method which is a little bit different, and this is easier, you’re going to let the cards fall just like before, but you’re going to get them as if you’re completing the Charlier Cut. Now you grip over with your thumb. And then you do the rest of the action. The reason this is easier is because you might find it difficult to clear and get your thumb like this. You can prevent this by pushing the cards more to your finger tips and stretching further, and then you should be able to do it. But if not, this is perfectly acceptable. No one will know the difference.

You simply regrip the cards and finish the cut like this. So again, you drop the third, they go underneath your thumb, take off another third, finish the cut. That’s how you do the triple cut.

Transcript

Hi. I’m Mike Patrick, and this is how to do a pivot cut. It looks like this. And you can do it in both hands, like so. The grip is that you’ve got to get into a straddle grip. A straddle grip means that your index finger and your pinky are on the opposite sides of the deck, more or less in the center of each packet, and your middle and ring fingers are on one edge, and your thumb is on the other.

So this creates a very, very secure grip for the cards. Your thumb is going to come to the lower left hand corner and break at about the halfway point. You’re then going to stretch these cards. And you’re trying to get your thumb and your pinky to be as far away from each other as possible. And then you simple reverse the action, bringing the thumb back, and you should end in the same type of position you were to begin with. When you’re doing these for speed, you’re going to try to get your recovery time so that you can get this going as quickly as you can and do as many as you can in a row. That’s what makes it look less sloppy. You can do them in each hand.

When you’re starting, and even when I do it in general, I usually do it with half the deck, because I’m usually doing it double-handed. You’ll probably have a much easier time if you use fewer cards than an entire deck at first. So once again, the mechanics are as such. You hold them in a straddle grip. Once again, index finger, pinky on the back, fingers on the side, thumb on the side. Your thumb comes to the back, cuts off about half of the cards, moves all the way like this and all the way back down, stretching as far as you can go. Hand flexibility helps you greatly in this. If you just hold the cards like this, not even practicing the cut, your fingers will eventually get much more flexible, and you’ll have an easier time doing it. So every time you do five of them, do one where you hold it, and then you finish it.

The best way of practicing this is if you do about, when you wake up, 10, 30 in the morning and 10 to 30 at night. And you will eventually get a very clean, very fast pivot cut. You have a great day.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Mike Patrick and I’m going to teach you how to do a false cut. It looks like this, you give the cards a cut like this and nothing has happened. Just to let you see what’s happening so you can follow along a little better, I’ll leave the 7 of diamonds on top of the deck face up and when I cut the cards it stays on top. You’re giving the impression. . . This is what you want it to feel like, you want it to feel like this happened, but this does not happen because that would actually cut the deck. You use what’s referred to as an interrupting action, which is the, this to give the people a little bit of a throw off to make it seem as though you’re cutting it differently from how you actually are.

So the first part of this is called a swing cut. I’ll briefly go over how to do that for real. You hold the cards like this, and your overhand grip comes so your thumb is on the bottom and these two, your middle and index fingers, are on the extreme upper right edge of the deck. You’re going to use your index finger to kick over a packet of cards. You’re going to lift up and over. This is going to be a little bit difficult at first, but when you get better control of your fingers you’ll be a little better at it. So, I kick this over and now this hand, I’m going to use my thumb to clip this essentially. This gets clipped and I take and I put this on top.

So that’s how to do a cut just in the hands, this is called a swing cut and we’re going to use this to do the false cut. So what you do is you swing cut this packet into my hand and all I do is I take this one and I kick it, I just tap it here and I put it on the table and then I take this on the table. So now, if I do this with a card face up, you’ll see I take this card and normally you would just do this, but what you do is you tap, let the cards in your hand go to the table then you place the other cards on the table. This is very deceptive, if you’re doing a card trick and you want it to look like you shuffled the deck and then just gave the deck a cut without actually doing anything. That’s how to do a false cut. I wish you much success.