by Colin Coughlin

Created on: July 30, 2008

Paying cards date back to around A.D 800 and card tricks have been an important part in many magicians act. In this article I will explain how to do a couple basic card tricks but will leave your audience wondering how you did it.

Trick 1. The Four Aces

For this card trick all you will need is a normal pack of playing cards. Shuffle the deck but make sure that the four aces are at the beginning of the deck. Ask someone in your audience to split the deck in two. Then have them split each half in two again.You should now have four fairly equal piles of cards. Make sure you know which pile has the four aces. It should usually be the far right pile. Tell the audience that you are going to do a special type of shuffle (you can call it whatever you want). Pick up the first pile of cards and take the first three cards and put them back where the pile was. Then take the next three cards and put one on top of each of the other three piles. Do this with each pile but make sure you do the pile with the aces last. Tell the person that no matter what pile they pick the top card will be an ace. When they pick a pile and it is an ace say " Wouldn't it be crazy if all the piles had an ace on top". The person will pick up each of the top cards and to their amazement each card will be an ace.

Trick 2. The Reversed Card Trick

For this card trick you will a normal deck of playing cards. Fan out the deck face down and tell someone to pick a card. For this trick to work make sure that the end card is face up but cannot be seen. When the person picks their card and is remembering what it is flip the deck over quickly so that the person doesn't realize. Tell them to put their card back in the deck wherever they want.They see that the top card is face down so they assume that the whole deck is face down but really it's the only one face down. They will then put their card face down in a face up deck. Then take the pack of cards and put it behind your back and just flip the first card over so that their card is the only card facing the wrong way. If you want you can move your arms around or talk to the audience to try and take their attention away from what you are doing behind you're back. Then pull the pack of cards from behind your back and fan out the cards and show that the card the person from the audience picked is somehow the only card facing the wrong way in the entire deck.

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