The Expert at the Card Table

The book every serious card worker ends up owning. Erdnase teaches the shifts, blind shuffles, palms, bottom deals and table work of the professional card handler, then the conjuring tricks built on them.

What’s inside

1. Card table artifice — professional secrets, hold-outs, prepared cards, confederacy, deportment
2. Technical terms
3. Blind shuffles, riffles and cuts — the Erdnase system, fancy blind cuts, the one-handed true cut
4. To indicate the location for the cut — by crimp and by jog
5. Bottom dealing and second dealing — including top and bottom dealing with one hand
6. Stocking, locating and securing — stock shuffling from two-card to twelve-card stocks, the euchre stock
7. Cull shuffling — culling two, three, four and nine cards
8. Palming — top and bottom palms, holding the palm while dealing
9. Shifts for the card table — the two-handed shift, the Erdnase shifts
10. Mode of holding the hand and skinning the hand
11. The player without an ally — dealing without the cut, holding out for the cut, the short deck
12. Three card monte — including Mexican monte
13. Legerdemain: shifts — the longitudinal, open, S. W. E. and diagonal palm shifts
14. Forcing and palming — the back palm
15. Changes and transformations — the top, bottom, palm and double palm changes
16. Blind shuffles retaining the entire order
17. Determining a card thought of — by the riffle, the springing flourish, the cut and the gaze
18. Favourite sleights for terminating tricks — the revolution, cards rising from the hand
19. Card tricks — the exclusive coterie, the divining rod, the invisible flight, the three aces

S. W. Erdnase, 1902 · Published by the author (Chicago). Complete 230-page PDF. Free to download: check out at $0 and the file arrives by email and on your order page.

This classic is in the public domain. Scans come from library copies, so expect the odd stain or stamp of an old book.