I have found three YouTube clips of Antonio Esfandiari (more famous as a poker player than a magician) pulling off a pretty impressive card trick:
Clip 1 (from 0:18)
Clip 2 (from 1:37)
Clip 3
Pretty impressive, no?
But how does he do it?
It is a special deck that can be purchased from almost any magic dealer.
Not to toot my own horn, but I just rewatched Clip 1, and paid close attention:
0:35 - Girl announces “9 of diamonds”
0:36 - Esfandiari appears to be grabbing something with his left hand from his pocket
0:40 - Just after Esfandiari says “look…” you can see a quick glimpse of what looks to be the red nine of diamonds in his left hand
So… from that point, performing the rest of the trick becomes trivial.
I guess the question now is… how does Esfandiari quickly “grab” from somewhere on his person the needed card?
OK, longtime lurker that signed up just to answer this post.
It’s a trick deck, alright. It’s called the Invisible Deck trick. It works like this:
The deck is ordinary deck of cards where the playing card faces are glossy and shiny and (important) slippery. The backs are unfinished, rougher and unslippery.
The cards are arranged so that all the even cards (… 6,8,10,Q) are facing one way, and the odd ones (…5,7,9,J,K) are facing the other way. When you fan the deck, you’ll see all even cards. Flip the whole deck, and only odd cards will show.
A-Ha! you say. Won’t the upside down cards show their backs when you fan them out, making it obvious you’ve got upside down cards mixed in? That’s there the glossy/rough finish comes in. All cards are paired back-to-back with another. The rough sides tend to not split the pairs whan you fan the deck, leaving only faces showing.
The cards are paired by these rules:
Even cards get paired with odd cards.
The sum of the two cards must equal 13, so a 4 always get paired with a 9, for example.
Red cards get paired up with black cards
finally, there’s a consistency among suit pairing where all hearts are paired with clubs and spades with diamonds.
So to do the trick, the participant names a card. Say the 9 of diamonds.
The magician does this:
The card is a odd one, so I’ll turn the pack of cards so the Even side is facing up.
I want to find the matching pair card, which will be facing up. So 13-9 = 4, and I know diamonds are always paired with spades, so I want the 4 of spades. I fan through the face up cards looking for the 4 of spaces. When I find it, I know the next (upside down card) will be the 9 of diamonds. Produce it, impress all the ladies, tuck the deck away before anyone can notice all the face cards are odd, and go to the bar and have lots of drinks.
And THAT’s how it’s done.
Search YouTube for Invisible Deck for more info.
That’s not exactly this trick, as Invisible Deck has the displayed cards face-up and the chosen card face-down, while this is the opposite. But I can see how a trick deck could be made to do the trick using this basic method–although I think it would be a bit trickier for the magician.
I think Kelly is on the right track. He definitely appears to grab something out of his jacket pocket, then brings that hand to the deck with an unnatural movement.
I believe that he somehow gets the correct card into his left hand, then slides it into the deck (upside down) from the far (from him) edge. Likely, that edge of the card box is cut away, allowing him to slip the card in. You never see that edge of the box, and once he pulls the deck out he drops the box like it’s hot.
As for how he manages to get a hold of the nine of diamonds, I’ll leave that for someone else to answer. 
mmm
Thanks for your detailed analysis Steelliver, but as SCSimmons pointed out, you appear to be describing a slightly different trick.
Besides the odd motion with his hands coming from his pockets, I also noticed the forced choice. She chooses the Ace of Diamonds first, and he tells her to pick another card because that would be too obvious.
There would be no reason to do this with a reversed Invisible deck. There is clearly a limited number of cards he can insert.
This makes me believe that he has different cards hidden in various places, and just produces the one that was called for. Unfortunately, neither the second or the third keep the camera on the guy so we can see what is happening. Heck, the second one is quite obviously cut, which is a no-no in televised magic, unless you are a complete incompetent.
Misdirection, I think. I suspect that Steelliver actually has the right of it, for the most part. The basic gimmick of the Invisible Deck can work just as well with the cards being ‘sticky’ on their faces, as long as you have some way to identify the cards without looking at those faces. A marked deck, or the cards being stacked in a specific order & the magician counts through to where he knows the requested card is.
Notice that in the first two clips, the whole deck is blue-backed, except the requested card is red-backed. In the last one, the deck is red-backed, and the requested card is blue-backed. I suspect that if he flipped the whole deck over, you’d see a bunch of backs of the opposite color, rather than faces … Also notice that he doesn’t pull out the deck at all until after the card is chosen. Both of these facts are consistent with the basic ‘invisible deck’ hypothesis. (He has to show the backs of the half of the deck that doesn’t contain the chosen card for the trick to work–so he needs to know the card before he opens the box.)