Palming fundamentals: how magicians hide a card in an empty hand

Palming means secretly holding a card in your hand while the hand looks empty and relaxed. The top palm takes a card from the top of the deck, the bottom palm from the bottom, and the gambler’s cop is a looser hold from the card-table tradition. Learn one top palm with a card already controlled to the top, and spend most of your practice on looking natural, not on the grip.

Why is palming worth learning?

A card that’s on top of the deck is useful. A card secretly in your hand is free. You can put the deck down, hand it out to be shuffled, and still produce the chosen card from a pocket, a wallet or thin air. Many classic plots that feel impossible to an audience rely on a palmed card at some point.

It is also one of the moves that shows the gap between doing a sleight and doing it well. As S. W. Erdnase put it in The Expert at the Card Table (1902), “The art of card palming can be brought to a degree of perfection that borders on the wonderful.”

What is palming?

Palming is holding an object concealed in the hand so the hand looks empty. Magicians palm cards, coins and other small objects, and use it to make things vanish, appear, swap places or change. With cards, the names you’ll meet most often are these:

• Top palm: secretly taking the top card (or several) of the deck into the hand. Erdnase gives two methods for it.
• Bottom palm: the same idea, taking cards from the bottom of the deck. Erdnase favoured it, calling bottom palming “far superior to palming from the top”.
• Gambler’s cop: a card held deep in the palm in a way that leaves the fingers free to move. Robert-Houdin described it in an 1868 book later published in English as Secrets of Conjuring and Magic.
• Back palm: despite the name, the card goes behind the hand. Erdnase himself wrote, “We are afraid the above title is a misnomer.” It is mostly a manipulation and stage technique.

How does palming work?

The grip itself is the easy part. Erdnase made this point plainly: it is very simple to place cards in the palm and hide them, but “entirely another matter” to take them from the deck so that no one suspects. Three principles do most of the work.

The deck is covered as briefly as possible. Erdnase’s rule: “In all cases of palming the deck should be covered for the smallest possible space of time.” The covering should happen under a natural reason, such as squaring up the cards or passing the deck to the other hand.

The action has a purpose. In the common public top palm, the hand comes over the deck to square it, and pressure at one corner from the little finger lets the top card spring up into the hand. The hand then carries on doing something ordinary.

The hand stays relaxed. A palmed card held with a tight, flat or frozen hand is easier to spot than the card itself. Use only as much pressure as keeps it from falling.

When would you use a palm?

• Card to pocket or wallet: the chosen card is palmed, the deck is set aside, and the card later appears somewhere it couldn’t be.
• Letting someone shuffle: palm off the controlled card and hand over the deck. Erdnase recommends exactly this: palm the card off, then pass the deck to the spectator to shuffle.
• Adding or removing cards: secretly adding a card to the deck or a packet, or taking one away.
• Vanishes and productions: the card disappears from the hand or appears at the fingertips.

How should you learn to palm cards?

Start with one top palm and ignore the rest for now. Modern beginner courses usually begin there, even though Erdnase preferred the bottom palm in 1902. That’s a good example of old advice and current teaching differing, and either way you only need one to start.

Before you palm anything, you need the card on top. If you haven’t got a reliable way to do that yet, read our guide to card control techniques first.

• Practise the empty-hand look. Hold a card in palm and go about ordinary things: pick up a glass, point, rest the hand on the table. When the palming hand moves like your empty hand, you’re close.
• Use a mirror and a camera. Check from the audience’s height and from the sides. Our post on angles in magic explains why side views matter.
• Get rid of the card. Practise replacing a palmed card on the deck as well as taking it. A palm you can’t get out of is half a move.

Be honest about the difficulty: palming takes regular practice before it feels natural, and the stiff-hand problem is the one most people fight longest.

Which products help you learn palming?

• The Expert at the Card Table by S. W. Erdnase, free from our public-domain library. It teaches the shifts, blind shuffles, palms and table work of the card handler, then the conjuring tricks built on them.
• Royal Road to Card Magic, a download series in which R. Paul Wilson works through Hugard and Braue’s book. Volume 3 opens with the palm: top palm, multiple top palm, replacing the top card and a card-in-pocket trick.
• Card College Volume 2 by Roberto Giobbi, which teaches the palm, the pass and the glimpse, with a chapter on psychology, misdirection and presentation.

What are the common palming mistakes?

• Squeezing the card. White knuckles and a cupped hand give it away. Lighter pressure, looser hand.
• Freezing the hand. A hand that suddenly stops moving draws attention. Keep gesturing as you would without the card.
• Covering the deck too long. The longer the hand hides the deck, the more someone wonders why.
• Palming with no reason to move. Squaring, handing over or setting down the deck gives the hand a reason to be there.
• Collecting palms. Learning five grips badly is less useful than one grip you trust.

Frequently asked questions