Springing the Cards

Effect:

Ever seen a magician spring cards from hand to hand? It's a a great magical flourish! Sure you have! They did it on Friends (but Rachel was using a trick deck). And you always see pictures of magicians doing this. But when you try, they all seem to fall to the ground. There are some subtle secrets to doing this right. Ready to learn?

Here's how you can impress your friends. Ready to learn how to spring cards from hand to hand? Here we go.

Secret:

Hold the deck in your right hand and bend the cards so that they bow inward to your hand. Let them slide and spring off your thumb. It will sound like you flipped through the deck really quick. Your hand will go from the shape of a "c" to the shape of a swan (if you are making shadow puppets on the wall) by the time you are done.

This trick does take a lot of practice, but here's how you need to learn it:

Start off by just springing the cards. Try to keep it nice and even. Just work on this for awhile until you can kind of control where the cards are going. At first, the playing cards will just jump in small groups, after a little practice you'll be able to get more of a steady stream of cards. If you're having bad luck with it, you can always try a newer deck, they're more springy!

Next, spring them into your left hand. But do this really close together. Practice with your left hand up against your chest as a backdrop as the cards shoot into it.

Now this is the cool part that most people don't know. Use your pinky of your left hand as a stopper. Your left hand will look like you are waving to someone, but the pinky will be pointing straight toward the cards. This works great! No one really even notices this when you do it, and it just works perfectly.

[When I was a kid, for years I could never figure out how anyone was actually catching the cards, and then as I was experiementing, I found this method. Of course, it's well documented now in many magic publications.]

Now slowly move away from your chest with the cards.

As you get better, bring your hands further and further apart.

This is key to the springing cards trick:
When you are springing the cards, start with your hands close together, move them apart, and then at the end bring them back together. This will give the illusion that you shot the card far from a distance the whole time, your audience won't realize you start close, move far, and then move close.

The second benefit to starting close, moving far, and then finishing with your hands close together is that you can square up some of the cards at the end, because your hands will be close together. It also allows you to go right into a shuffle or other card move fairly quickly, or even repeat it a few times.

Beleive me, you will really impress people with this stunt! Take the time to learn it and you'll have a great card skill for life!

This is a fun trick, but the sound WILL get annoying while you practice to any family members, roommates, co-workers, or cellmates. This shouldn't be too much of a problem, but if you really DO have cellmates, I wouldn't suggest doing this trick. Instead, learn how to cheat at card games. Plenty of examples of that throughout this site!