Cool Card Magic Trick You Can Do
Three-Card Monte trick with jumbo playing cards.
Step 1: Learn some magic:
I’d like to teach you how to do some magic. I know this is a little unusual, a magicians teaching magic, but I would like to teach you something that you can do at home. So what we’ll do is I’ll show you the trick the way I normally present it. We’ll take a little break and when we come back I’ll show you exactly how to do it. And how to make it at home.
Step 2: What's my favourite card:
So what we have, and actually I have to admit, this isn’t really a trick, this is more of a test. I like to start my shows of with this so I can see how observant my audiences are, so I know what I can get away with for the rest of the show. But anyway, what I have are three jumbo cards. Now in just a second, I’ll show you the faces of the cards. And just so you know, one of these cards is my favourite card. Now, I’m not going to tell you which one it is yet, I will give you a few hints, but if you’re home with anybody, don’t yell it out, just think to yourself which one you think is my favourite card. Alright, three cards there. Okay I’m going to give you the hint. Here’s the hint and I want everyone to get this. My favourite colour is the colour black. Oh it’s getting easy now isn’t it? Okay, well I’m going to make this super easy I’ll take my favourite card and place it right here on my table, which leaves me with two cards left. The two kings. Now, let’s see if you remember. What is my favorite card? Oh very good. The ace, excellent. So you have been paying attention. Very observant. But actually, I have been tricking you. To be honest with you, the ace really isn’t my favourite card. My favourite card is my library card! Sure, because I can use this to learn to do just about anything. And speaking of learning something, as soon as we take a little break here, you’re going to learn exactly how to do this at home and fool all your friends and relatives. Thank you very much we’ll be back in just a little bit.
Step 3: The three card monty:
Well right now we’re going to teach you some magic. I know a lot of you are interested in doing your own magic and I love it when I walk around places in Phoenix when I see you do tricks for me, so please, keep it up and we definitely want to see you on stage one day too. But what I have here is what’s called affectionately the Three Card Monty. Now this was named after the infamous game Three Card Monty where they would play on the streets of New York for money, so I don’t recommend you play that game that is absolutely a scam but anyway, but as well as this trick is. But so let me just do it real quick for you again, and then I’ll show you how to do it, and then I’ll show you a variation of it, because not everybody’s going to be wanting to use large cards like this, I just do this for visual purposes. You can do it with just regular size cards.
Step 4: Trick run through:
But the way it works is we have three cards, and one is my favourite card, as goes the pattern. Then what I do is I say which one do you think is my favourite card, it doesn’t matter. I take off the middle card, don’t show it yet, and place it on my table. And that leaves me with two cards left. And you were watching at home, of course those are the two kings, and my favourite card, what is that everyone will say the ace, but of course it’s not the ace, my favourite card is really my library card. And it is actually, to be honest with you. But let me show you how it works.
Step 5: How it works:
It’s really a very, very simple switch, but very devious. The way it works is you’re going to need to have four cards, technically, in order to do this trick. One will be your library card. Now, you don’t have to use a real library card, in fact this was printed right off a computer and then laminated. It was place on top of a large playing card that I got at a dollar store, or party store I believe it was. But it doesn’t have to be a library card either; I’ll show you in just a minute about what else you can use. But you’ll need, I guess what you’d call, a novelty card, would be your best bet. A lot of times, magicians use their business card in this so if you’re in business this is a great way to do it, so if you’re a lawyer or a doctor, that would be kinda cool to hand out your business card this way. I’m not sure how you would tie it in, but if you can, use it. But anyway, you’ll need to have a novelty card. Then you’ll just need to have a regular old card. Doesn’t matter what this is. I usually try to have the two cards match, but it really doesn’t matter. But that’s going to be your regular card. This is your only normal card in the deck, in the three or four.
Step 6: The Gimmick card:
Now here’s the trick, here’s the gimmick card, and this is the most exciting piece, and there it is, right there. You’ll see what I have, and, if Joe, if we can just get a little closer on that, I want to show what we’re looking at. That’s perfect, thank you Joe. And what we have, is we have what’s called a flap card. There we go. You’ll see, this is a regular king, okay, because it’s gunna match my other king here, it doesn’t have to be the same suit, but what I have is a small flap in this card. It’s cut out sort of like a rectangle, or a triangle piece, like that. And then, it’s just simply, taped right along this edge here, and like that. So from the back of this card it looks like a normal card, from the front of this card it does not look like a normal card. You never want to show this to the audience, but, you can certainly show this with no problem at all. Excuse me, I just dropped my novelty card. Okay, so let me show you the setup. We’ve got this, which is cut out like that. Okay, then you have your novelty card. And what you do is you place that, let me do it this way so you can see, you place your novelty card right underneath that small hinged area, so that’s the look with two, with apparently two cards, but if you’re looking at it this way it kinda looks a little weird, so you’re not gunna show anyone this yet. And then you just simply take your third card, which is your normal card, and place that right over top of all that ugly stuff that you don’t want them to see. Okay? So there’s your set-up.
Step 7: Make Magic:
Now from the front or the back, this very fairly looks like three cards, there’s absolutely no doubt, doesn’t it? Sure. Alright, so this is real easy. When you’re using small cards, you may have to put your thumb over this bottom portion, I’ll show you that in a second with smaller cards, but you might have to cover up a little bit at the bottom. But with large cards you have enough room that you can really show these quite openly, okay, from either side. The, all you have to do is say which one is my favourite card, and then you pull out the one in the centre and place it, without showing them, onto the table. Now let me show you a back view, this is my view of what it’s going to look like. Can you see that okay? When I take the card out, I’m going to be taking the novelty card, which is hidden behind this ace, I’m going to be taking this out and putting it on my table. Okay. Which leaves me with this configuration here. Now, obviously, from the back, it looks fine, it looks like two cards, but I can’t show the audience this yet. Okay, but it’s real simple to alleviate the problem, just slide this card over and hide the hidden card that’s in there. So now I’ve got two very easily shown cards, I can show that from pretty much any angle, although I don’t necessarily want to do that, but I can certainly go like this and say okay, you were right, you were very observant, the two kings were not my favourite cards, so what is my favourite card. Then you bring attention, I usually ditch these, if you noticed, I just toss them right behind my table, it gets the heat off anything, because now all the attention is going to be on this card and there’s no reason for their minds to go back to those two cards. So just get them right out of the way, stick them in your pocket or something like that. But now you’re ready for the novelty card, and I say, my favourite card’s my library card. Alright? So that’s the Three Card Monty. Killer trick.
Step 8: For regular cards:
Now let me show you a way, that if you’re not going to use jumbo cards like this, because it’s not something you can just put in your pocket and walk around with. I’ll show you how to make it up with a smaller group of cards. And this is the way I would present it if I wasn’t doing a library show, let’s say, if I was just doing it for friends or family, and this is probably the method that you will use is I use three small cards, and one of these is my favourite card. Now, in this particular case I have two tens and a seven in the centre there. But which one do you think is my favourite card, it doesn’t matter, I’m going to take the middle card and place that on my table, which leaves me with two cards left, and in this example, the two tens. Okay, again, very fairly you’ll be able to show that, but what was my favourite card. Of course, they’re all going to say the seven, and you’ll say, yes you are very observant, but wouldn’t it be amazing if I could make that card change? Yes it would.
Step 9: Thanks for watching:
And after I got done doing that, you would say, Eric, how did you do that, and I would very simply tell you that it’s all done with mirrors. And that’s really simple to make up, all this is, is what’s called a mirror card. And all I did was I took a regular playing card, and I took the little glue sticks, they’re the easiest to work with and they stay pliable, the glue, once it dries pliable. But just glue stick a card, on the face of the card, and then stick this right on a nice, flat piece of aluminium foil, bop, and just push it down all the way, and then just very tightly trim your edges so that no aluminium foil shows on the outside. So now you have yourself a little mirror card, which will last you for a long time, actually, and then you do the exact same set-up as with did with our large ones. One regular card, one gimmick card, which again has that little flap, right there, that you simply stick the mirror card underneath, and then hide the entire conglomeration with the normal card. And if you’ll notice on this, which is a good example, if you can see that Joe. Can you just get a close-up on the bottom of that card there, you will see a little bit of that mirror here because the cards are smaller. So when I hold it, I just have to put my thumb right over that area. No big deal. There we go. So we hide it. So there we go, that’s the Three Card Monty, I hope you have a great, great time with that trick. I will blow your friends’ mind, unless they saw the show
