Hi, everyone. Today, I am going to teach you how to do the Elmsley Count. First, let me perform it for you. I have four red-back playing cards. You can see I have got one, two, three and four. What is really neat is that if I just snap. Now, I have got one blue-back card and three red-back cards.
I am going to teach how to do the Elmsley Count. Basically, it is a card count that allows you, the magician, to show four cards to the spectator, but you are really only showing them three. You get to hide one of the cards because you are showing one of the cards twice. Let me teach this.
The card that you want to hide in this case, the blue card should always be third down from the bottom. Once you are in this position, close the cards. Now, I am going to do this very slowly so you can understand. Once you have them in this position. Okay. Use your thumb to peel off the card on top. Just pull it back just like that. Take this three cards out just like so. So at this point you have one card over here, three cards here.
Now, the next step is to push the top two cards from over here to here as one. Okay. So they think it is one, but really there is that blue card right there. Okay. So you push them over there as one. Now, here is the trick. As you are pushing this two cards over here, you take these fingers back here and you pull that bottom card out so that you can then do three and four. Let me show that to you once more. Okay.
First, you get into this position, close them. Take the top card. Okay, just one card off the top at the beginning and bring it to the left. Now, push the two cards over here as one. So you are now counting two and at the same time take these fingers and you are going to bring both of these cards out from underneath very quickly and then you count three and four.
Okay. So let me show this to you once more in fast feed. Close it like this and you go up to a spectator and you say “Look I got one, two, three, four cards.” And one last time, I will show you how to do this. Get them like that. Of course, it will take some practice because you do not want to flash the card. Take the top card off. Boom! Slide these two from here over here using your thumb, just like that. Take the one from the bottom. Place it on top three then take your final card. Drop it on top four.
That is the Elmsley Count. It is a great move and with some practice and doing this in real speed. People really think they are seeing all four cards when in essence they really only seeing three of the cards because you are hiding one of them. This is a great effect. In this case we use a blue-back card. You could also have a card that is face off and you hide. So this is great to do just by itself or it is good learn this because there are many magic tricks where you use the Elmsley Count as part of the trick itself. So I hope you enjoyed the tutorial and performance for the Elmsley Count and I look forward to teaching some more magic in the future.
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