Combine raw talent with extreme dedication and an engaging stage presence, and you have Richard Turner. Turner’s ability to convincingly perform almost anything with cards, in many cases as well or better than anyone on the planet, is about as legendary as his 16 hours of practice a day. As the name implies, this DVD offers a mix of fans, flourishes, false cuts, controls and shuffles. Some are basic and may be found on other flourish DVDs while others are flashy and twisted Turner variations. All can add visual interest to your card routines.
Looking Good
Turner offers excellent instruction on standard flourishes that include: thumb fan, pressure fan, one-handed shuffle, waterfall and card springing. All manipulations are shown in real time, then in slow motion and then followed by Turner’s step-by-step instruction.
Turner offers variations on some standards. His “3D card spread” is a traditional table spread that’s performed an angle. His intriguing “3 Sides to a Deck” offers a three-phase fanning sequence that makes a deck appear to have three sides. “The Diminishing Thumb Fan” is a well known variation on the thumb fan where a magician adjusts the position of his hands to alter the size of a card fan.
One-Handed
His “One-Handed Triple Cut” offers a multi-phase, three-way cut that is flashy and is certain to draw attention. “Turner’s Cross Faro Fan” and “Turner’s Jumbo Faro Fan” are variations on conventional jumbo fans, with the upper tier of cards placed at different angles and positions. “ASA Spades Fan” is a thumb fan performed with the cards at a disparate angle that creates an unusual pattern.
Some Turner creations significantly ramp-up the difficulty but are only marginally more impressive than the manipulations that they are based on. His “End Over End One-Handed Cut” is a Charlier Cut with the cards held the long way, and the “Longitudinal One-Handed Shuffle” is his one-handed shuffle with the cards held in the same manner-90 degrees from the traditional angle.
I particularly liked Turner’s “Double Bridge Shuffle,” a single faro shuffle that culminates in two bridges performed one after the other and in different directions. I took the time to learn this one but have not yet found a place to showcase it in my close-up sets.
“Turner’s One-Handed Cut With a Backflip,” and “One-Handed Triple Cut with a Backflip” are flashy one-handed cuts that will appeal to experienced card handlers. As the names imply, they feature a flamboyant flip of a deck section.
He teaches first rate card controls with his “One-Handed Shuffle-Card Control” and “Fan Find”-locating a card and controlling it when a spectator returns a chosen card to a fan. “Assembly Line Shuffle” is a two handed cut system that mixes the cards, but maintains the top half.
There’s a slick “Spread to a Gambler’s Cop” that allows you steal a card after closing up a table spread, but here, an adequate explanation somehow didn’t make it onto the DVD. Turner inadvertently fails to explain the move.
Turner also teaches his one-handed shuffles and strip-outs (yes, stripping out an entire deck with just one hand), and he performs these with the deck held in the traditional manner and the long way. While I regularly perform a one-handed shuffle in my shows and can perform a full-deck strip-out using two hands, I’m not even going to attempt this one. This is material that Turner does well and it impresses the heck out of other magicians.
