(ethereal electronic music)
(upbeat electronic music)
- Yo, what is up? Chris Ramsay here, welcome back.
I like this little backdrop by the way,
this is my living room, I thought I'd set it up nice,
it's a bit of a change from being in my office all the time.
Super stoked today because I'm going to bring you a tutorial
on the Skater Cut as well as the Kickflip variation
and my own closer.
I've gotten permission from Dan and Dave to use this.
Dan and Dave who are the originators of this cut,
I believe it's taught in the The Trilogy,
or and then some, I'm not too sure.
It's probably one of the flashiest cuts that I know,
it catches the eye, it relies heavily
on physics and gravity, which is really cool.
And it's ultra satisfying to nail down.
Now don't get me wrong, this is one of those cuts
that will take a while for you to learn,
it's not gonna be the easiest of cuts,
but if you put the time in, just come back to it,
drop the cards, come back to the cards,
and sort of keep playing around with it,
eventually you'll just get it,
it'll just sink in, and once you get it,
you can't like, unlearn it.
And the reason it's called the Kickflip cut
is because your finger (imitates pop) kickflips that card,
that pack of cards almost like a deck,
like a skateboard deck--
Oh I see what they did there.
So anyways, super stoked to be able
to teach this to you guys today.
Also, just a quick note, if you haven't seen it yet,
my merch store is now up on Teespring.
You can go ahead and cop yourself
some hoodies, some long sleeves, some T-shirts
in all different sorts of colors.
I like the red hoodies myself,
but there's a whole bunch of clothes up there right now
for sale if you want to go ahead
and support me and this channel,
and cop yourselves some cool clothes to boot,
check out the Teespring link, I'll leave it down below.
A lot of you guys message me as well
because the campaigns say they're only available
for three days, but three days is basically the batches.
So after three days, they renew
and they're there permanently.
Don't fret if you can't buy one right now,
they will be there for a while,
but I appreciate all of you who have picked some up,
and helped support me, and if you have a picture
of you wearing any of this, send it my way,
I'll retweet it and show you guys some love.
So thanks a lot.
All right, enough of that, let's get into
the tutorial of the Kickflip Skater cut.
Right now, grab yourself a deck of cards, let's go.
All right, so to start off this tutorial,
I'll teach it from this angle and then we'll flip it around
and give you an over-the-shoulder view as well,
to help facilitate this.
By the way, these cards right here,
are the Ace Fulton Casino cards.
Some of my favorite colors here,
this is like some burnt orange, really, really cool.
They handle really like, they feel weird,
I'm not gonna lie, they don't feel like
a standard deck of cards, they weren't crushed obviously,
because you see how thick they are?
But they do feel very slim,
like they're super easy to manipulate,
they feel like they're worn in right out of the box.
You got some cool little,
you know the art work on the faces is really cool.
Especially the jokers, now that's a classic joker.
If you want to check these cards out,
my buddies over at Art of Play have them in stock.
I'll leave the link below where you can check that out.
Basically they have the biggest
repertoire of playing cards online.
Good friends of mine and if you want to go
and show them some love and grab yourself
some decks of cards, it's just fun to browse,
head on over to artofplay.com.
All right, so here we go, so first things first,
you're gonna want to hold that in a straddle grip,
and a straddle grip is basically this.
Where your pinky and index are holding the long ends
of the card and you want to do this with your dealer hand.
So the hand that you hold the cards in,
whether you're right-handed or you're left-handed,
if you're left-handed, just mirror this whole video,
flip it or something.
Hold the mirror up to the video, and watch the mirror.
As you're here, you're gonna break this off into a Z packet.
Now what a Z grip is, is this basically.
And how to do that, is first of all,
your right thumb, all right, your thumb's
gonna come behind here, and you're gonna contact
basically the lower right part of the deck here, back here.
With your thumb, you're gonna lift up a packet,
now it doesn't have to be a big packet,
it could be just a medium packet,
and with your middle finger here, on the corner,
right here, you're gonna lift up another packet.
So thumb lifts up against the index,
and then that in between this thumb, and this middle finger,
you're lifting up another packet.
Now that's the Z grip,
a lot of flourishes start with Z grip.
Thumb back here, you wanna cut a chunk
maybe I would say third, up to a half,
not necessarily a half, little bit less,
all right, so you're here.
Look where my thumb is placed,
it's not here, it's not here, it's over here, okay?
Right by my pinky. Boom.
Middle finger is gonna grab this corner
and lift it up, now you have the Z grip.
So get comfortable with that before you move on.
Just practice this.
Practice automatically getting into that,
it'll take a while, but once you have
the muscle memory build up,
it'll be natural to just want to
get into that Z grip immediately.
So once you're in that Z grip, you're here, okay?
Index is going to break off a fourth packet,
and that's where you get the four packets from.
Your right hand index is going to
(imitates click) split that top pack and grab
maybe half of those cards, okay?
Now you've got a Z grip and you've got
this little middle packet here,
the middle packet here is the one
that's going to go out for a spin. Woo!
You've got your middle finger
contacting the corner, so again,
you're on the corner here with your middle finger,
you lift up here so you're middle finger's
still contacting the corner.
Now you wanna have, I would say
five to seven cards to give it a good spin.
Too many cards, the cards will go flying,
not enough cards gonna be really hard to spin the card.
So you want somewhere between, I say this is ideal,
that's like five, between like four and six, around there,
and you'll feel that, you'll feel when it's too big.
So here ... That's what she said.
So here, break off, now you have this packet
which is gonna go out for a spin.
Well how do we get it out there?
Your thumb, all right, on your left hand
is going to contact the corner of that little middle,
where your middle finger is, you're going to just
kick it out to the side and your thumb
is gonna contact that, okay?
Now, here's the thing, check this out.
You're going to extract this packet
using your thumb and your middle finger
all the while, holding this top packet
between your thumb and your index, okay?
So it's gonna look like that.
And you wanna lift it away from the deck.
So again, Z grip, split,
thumb comes to the bottom corner here
with the middle finger, and you're going to extract, okay?
That extraction here is how the flip's gonna happen.
You gotta be away from the deck,
if you're too close it'll knock the deck while it flips.
You gotta really extend your fingers,
that's a really good tip, is really extend your thumb,
extend your middle finger, get it out there,
and here's the finger that's gonna do the kick,
is the ring finger.
The ring finger's gonna come up here,
so you're gonna kinda come up and over,
and it's gonna contact this part of the card.
That's gonna make it rotate, okay?
Boom.
Thumb comes here,
push out, ring finger's here,
and here's where you're gonna do the kick.
This is not easy to do, okay?
You have to have an extremely light grip
on the thumb and the middle finger.
If you're too tight here,
you're not gonna be able to kick that.
All right? It's just gonna not move.
So this is where the difficulty level comes in.
And a good trick to have this kick properly,
is I'm not holding the cards in the middle like this,
I'm kind of, I don't know if you see that,
so my middle finger here and my thumb here
are not like this, they're kinda like, underneath it.
And kind of resting underneath it.
It's like if you were to take the cards and rest it here.
Now gravity's gonna hold them there,
gravity's gonna hold them down,
but 'cause if I'm here, it'll be really hard
for me to kick that out because I'm holding them.
So instead, it's kind of like resting.
Break off, thumb comes here, and you extend.
Now, as soon as that extension is done
and you're holding this here,
that ring finger's gonna come in
and you're gonna give it a little bit of a flick.
Now this is gonna take practice,
because you don't have that muscle built up yet.
So you're gonna give it a little bit of a flick
and sometimes it won't even move,
it'll barely move, and every now and then,
you're gonna nail it and you're gonna be like, "Oh!".
You'll be one step closer to getting this every time.
I can't really teach you the exact way of doing it,
it's just something you're gonna have to try out.
So if you get around this here,
it's just gonna have that spin, one full rotation.
Once you're here, and you've done the flip,
or you haven't, it doesn't really matter,
once you're here, now mind you,
you can practice this whole cut
without the spinning thing and you can
come back to that later if you like,
that's actually a really good tip.
If you just wanna learn the cut,
and work on the kick later, you're here,
and then you could come right back and go into the closer.
So let's go right from the extraction to the closer.
I've extracted, I've done my kick,
now I'm gonna come back into that same gape,
that same opening and two thumbs are gonna connect.
I'm gonna pass off that corner, to that one.
All right, so now, I'm holding it with this thumb
and the middle finger.
I'm taking it slow for you guys,
because I know this is a lot, so I'm gonna go over it again,
and again, and again so you guys get it.
Z grip, break off, thumb comes here,
we extract, we do the kick.
You're gonna come right back into that hole, right there.
And your two thumbs are going to meet,
where you're gonna hand off that corner to this thumb.
So as you pass it off, you're also going to hold
this packet, and this packet with this thumb.
So it's gonna be like that, all right?
This packet flipped, comes back in,
I pass it to my other thumb, now this thumb
takes both of those, you see that?
Now my thumb is pivoting both of those packets.
I'm going to use my index and I'm going to let this packet
just sort of fall down here, and with this thumb,
I'm just going to do basically a Scissor cut.
We'll get into the toss after.
All right, let's look at that from a different angle.
All right, so, straddle grip, thumb,
middle finger, Z grip. Okay?
Break off with the index,
thumb contacts this middle one here.
Extends everything, everything is super extended.
So that way my ring finger can come in and do that kick.
Ring finger, kick.
Once that kick's done, it's gonna go back into that middle.
Thumb's gonna grab that corner and this thumb
is gonna grab these two packets,
rotating this packet here back into Straddle grip,
index rotates this as I do my scissor cut.
So bam, bam, we've kicked it, it comes back,
goes onto the middle, thumb grabs that corner,
this thumb takes care of these two.
This, gets dropped into Straddle grip,
index here does a full rotation
as this hand just extends and Scissor cuts.
Falls on packet, every time.
All right, I think that's about it,
let's go over it one more time.
Kick, come back in that middle, give it to this thumb,
this thumb grabs these two, rotate with the index,
as my index rotates this card, or these cards.
I Scissor cut over here, and I, boom,
let the packet flip, and that is it.
All right guys, so that's about it
for this tutorial on Monday.
Appreciate you guys sticking around,
and I know this is a difficult cut to learn
because it is four packets, so there's a lot
going on with the fingers, but remember what I told you,
remember that you don't have to kick the packet.
You can practice without it just to get the handling right.
That opening is really where it's all gonna happen
once your finger placement is down.
You're gonna nail it, nine times out of ten.
So have fun with that, get your cards dirty,
whatever that means, and thanks for tuning in.
We'll see you guys later this week,
I got a few videos popping this week,
so get ready for that.
Thanks for tuning in, we'll see you on the next one.
Peace.