Everyone knows how to shuffle a deck of 52 cards, its pretty easy, even for those without the highest dexterity rating. Due to my recent fascination with Killer Bunnies. I’m starting to need to know how to shuffle a larger and larger sized deck. This is clearly a problem I need to solve as when I was playing on Christmas with Sarah and Tony we pulled many Dolla and many Play Immediately cards in a row. (Just so you know what size deck of cards we’re talking about, I received three expansion packs as a gift and bought 2 more. This brings our killer bunnies set up to 500 cards.)
Doing a quick web search for “how to shuffle a large deck of cards” has gotten me off to a good start. Wikipedia has an entry on shuffling that lists various techniques. I had already thought of what is know as a Pile shuffle, and that seems to be the best bet. Cool fact of the day is that Pile shuffling is the only legal form of shuffling in bridge. However, I think with 500 cards, we’ll need to do more than 4 piles. I really can’t think of anything better, and it should got the job done. It’ll at least insure that cards that were next to each other preshuffle (from the last game) aren’t next to each other anymore. I’m open to other ideas if anyone has any.
One useless search return was how to shuffle Tarot cards that are physically large, not many in number. I guess if I was playing with HUGE CARDS, that might be useful to me. There were also many links to algorithms for shuffling cards in your programming, but that’s not exactly what I need either.