One trick attributed to Copperfield that has made the rounds on the Internet is a card illusion in which the magician appears to read your mind. This trick is one of the first a novice performer learns. In it the magician lays out five cards and tells the subject to think of one of them. The subject is to concentrate hard on that card while the magician takes up the five he’s laid out. Then he lays down four cards, and lo! the chosen card is gone! The trick here is that all the four cards laid back down are different from the five originally dealt, so none of the original five are present. You arrange this by dealing the final four from the bottom of the deck.
Copperfield, like all illusionists, is a showman. The secret of illusion is misdirection, so a good patter is essential. One of Copperfield’s tricks involves a story about his grandfather, who taught him a card trick in which he pulls all four aces from a seemingly well-shuffled deck, places them in four separate piles of cards, then makes them disappear, only to have them pop up in a fifth stack. On stage he performs this with a camera focused on his hands and the image on a large screen behind him. Only another magician could tell how he manipulates the cards, even though the trick is done entirely with basic palming and double dealing.
An illusionist named Geoff Williams does a rather nifty trick he calls the I Hate David Copperfield Trick. In it he takes three cards and appears to shove one of them through one of the others. He can do this trick with a closeup camera that never leaves his hands or cuts away. This trick employs skillful use of a sort of double dealing by which a card is kept hidden behind another card until it’s needed.