Learn how to throw playing cards, Ricky Jay style

Here at The A.V. Club, we are obsessed with Ricky Jay—prodigious sleight-of-hand master, author, actor in Paul Thomas Anderson films, and David Mamet collaborator. The one indelible image of Ricky Jay came in his Broadway run of Ricky Jay And His 52 Assistants:

Here he is, throwing a playing card—like a ninja with throwing stars—into the outer rind of a watermelon. My god.

We’ve been into card throwing ever since, for party-trick and self-defense purposes. So The A.V. Club enlisted Andrei Jikh of the magic and cardisty-tutorial site Theory11 to show us step by step how to be a card ninja badass like Ricky Jay.