monte force

Sharing a cool in-the-hands force I’ve been playing around with recently. It’s simple enough to do and not too specific in it’s process so you can probably tag this onto a bunch of tricks that need a force that isn’t just one step.

I’ll describe this as a right handed card handler. FASDIU in your left hand, you’re going to force the third card from the top. Start by pushing the top three cards over into the right hand. Then push over a few more cards on top of that first three. And keep doing that as you ask the spectator to tell you when to stop. When they do so, you go one card at a time to get more precise. They say stop again.

Position check: force card is at the bottom of the cards in your right hand.

Up jog the top card in your left hand. Then use your right fingers to push the bottom its packet to the left to make half a spread while your left thumb pushes its cards over into the right to connect the spread with the up jogged card in the middle.

Position check: x-card out-jogged in the middle of the spread, the card above is the force card.

Table all the cards above the force card. You’ll hold everything else in a spread with your left hand for a sec as you do this. Then your right hand takes the force card, the up-jogged card, and the indifferent card below it, as your left hand tables the rest of the cards.

Position check (from left to right):
x-card (bottom card) // up-jogged x-card (middle) // force card (top card)

This should look familiar if you’ve done any sort of monte routines in the hands. You’ll now execute the monte switch but keeping the force card face down.

Left hand takes the left x-card and flip face up. As this happens, your right thumb pushes the force card forward diagonally to the left, and your right fingers pull the up-jogged x-card in the opposite direction. Right hand feeds the up-jogged selection into the left fingers below the face up x-card, still up-jogged. Then the right hand turns over its x-card and feeds that below the other two cards aligned with the other face up x-card. Looks like this:

Position check (from left to right):
face up x-card (top), up-jogged force card (middle), face up x-card (bottom)

As you execute the switch, you’d say the good ol’ if you went one more, or one less…

You’re good to go from here and have them take out the face down card, you can let the face down card slide out onto the table for later, or whatever.

It has a nice built-in process to the selection that feels pretty natural. The flow is nice going from a few cards to singles. I’ve been digging it.

Hope everyone had a great holiday, and happy new year!