A Shuffle No One Has Ever Seen

It sounds impossible, but it is pure mathematics. The number of ways to arrange 52 cards is 52 factorial: a number 68 digits long.

To get a sense of the scale: if every human being who has ever walked the Earth had shuffled a deck every second since the universe began, we still would not have covered even a laughably small fraction of the possible combinations.

So when you shuffle well (seven riffle shuffles are enough, mathematicians say), the odds are overwhelming that you are holding an order no human hand has ever held before, and that no one will ever repeat.

A two-euro pack of cards: the cheapest novelty machine in the world.