Nobody has ever shuffled like you

Every time you give a deck of 52 cards a good shuffle, that exact order has almost certainly never existed before in all of human history.

This isn't poetry, it's combinatorics. The number of ways to arrange 52 cards is 52 factorial: a number with 68 digits. If every person on the planet had shuffled a deck every second since the Big Bang, we still wouldn't have explored even the tiniest fraction of all the combinations. The order you hold in your hands is, with overwhelming probability, an absolute premiere.

And a practical note from the mathematician Persi Diaconis, who studied shuffling for decades: to make a deck truly random you need about seven riffle shuffles. With fewer, the previous order keeps peeking through.

Source: Stanford University