Price: $18.99
“Acclaimed as the most renowned and meticulously scrutinized book on the art of card manipulation, The Expert at the Card Table is a century-old classic in gaming literature,” – Martin Gardner’s Foreword. This indispensable guide to achieving supreme card mastery is credited to S. W. Erdnase, a celebrated authority on card manipulation. He instructs readers on executing the stunning tricks and sleights, many of his innovative creations that skyrocketed him to fame.
The first section of this seminal work focuses on card table artifice, or plainly stated, the cunning art of card cheating. Erdnase meticulously guides you through his unique techniques of false shuffling, false riffling and cutting, dealing from the bottom, and other ingenious maneuvers like card palming, ‘skinning the hand,’ and even the infamous three-card monte.
The subsequent section delves into the realm of legerdemain: the craft of card forcing, one- and two-hand transformations, the elusive ‘slide,’ and more. Erdnase offers a selection of his most spectacular card tricks, such as The Acrobatic Jacks, The Exclusive Coterie, The Divining Rod, The Invisible Flights, A Mind Reading Trick, among others.
In an enlightening Foreword to this edition, Martin Gardner narrates the unfortunate personal circumstances of the author and chronicles the illustrious history of this renowned book. Gardner maintains that the methods detailed in this book “remain as relevant and beneficial for magicians and card hustlers today as they were in 1902. This book endures as the definitive guide for card ‘mechanics,’ and continues to be as captivating to read as it was at the dawn of the twentieth century.”