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Hi everybody! Malik the Magic Guy for expertvillage.com. One of the more important principles in card
magic is something called the key card principle; that is what I am going to teach you about
now. We are going to combine that with the principle called glimpsing in a little while.
But basically, what the key card principle is, is when you take a card that you know
of, let’s say the bottom card of the deck, and you use that to mark the position of another
card. So let’s say they have selected a card like the 3 of clubs. We would have ways
of putting this card on top of or underneath the 3 of clubs, and we could go through the
deck and by looking for our key card, we could tell what card was next to it. That is the
basic use of the key card, but you could use it for other things as well. For instance,
if I had had a set up of cards on the bottom of the deck, so let’s say I had the 4 aces
on the bottom of the deck,
or near the bottom of the deck. Let’s say I had them behind the king, and I had some
other cards here. What I could do is, if I wanted to spread through the cards and not
let people see I had the aces, but I knew they were behind the king, I could stop when
I got to the king, and then I would know that the next 4 cards behind it are the aces. So
anytime you use a card or a group of cards to mark the positions of other cards in the
deck, that is the key card principle. In a minute, I am going to teach you some other
ways to use it: some tricks you can do with it and some fun ways to utilize the key card
principle.