Transcript
Hi. My name is Mike Patrick, and I’m going to teach you how to do the thumb fan. You hold the deck so that it goes with your middle finger and index finger should ride along these, and you’re two fingers aren’t really used, your ring and pinky. Your thumb just goes along the line. This will be along the end of the deck, and you’re going to essentially again beveling the deck if you watched the ribbon spread video, and you move in an arc as you create a fan. If I did the fan faster, it would look a little nicer. But the main action when you’re doing this is sort of you go in a straight line to the right until you reach about here, and that’s when I bring it in. I hook it, and it comes back into the hand. When you do this initially, you’re going to have a hard time.
This takes a while to get consistent, but some of your pitfalls will be the following. You’ll either do this, where you’ll get this giant chunk at the bottom of the deck that doesn’t look any good. And sometimes some people do this, where they get that chunk at the top of the deck, and it’s generally uneven. The ways to avoid this are again you’ve got to make sure you have your bevel.
That’s very important. And you just kind of apply even pressure as you go. And you want to make sure that you’re applying pressure along the entire unit at a time. You’re not just trying to spread a little bit at a time and going up. You do the whole thing in one shot like this. Doing it face up looks a little bit nicer. If you do it in your left hand, it will create all the indexes of all of the cards. And if you do it in your right hand, all the indexes will be hidden if you do a perfect fan.
This can be useful in some magic tricks, but if you can just do a nice fan and have someone pick a card, that will be just as great. And that is how you do the thumb fan.
