Transcript
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’.
