Excellent and interesting card trick. The trick is partly self operating in that the cards are preset in the reverse order that they need to appear during the story. Counting the cards at the beginning reverses the order again and places them in correct order and also gives the impression that the deck is being verified as being honest. The difficult part is restoring the deck to it's original order after each time that it is cut. That's the purpose of counting off some cards for the "1st street", "2nd street", etc. He is looking for a specific point in the deck that allows him to reassemble the deck in it's original order. This basically just cancels out the cut. Pretty neat.