How to Shuffle Cards: Riffle, Bridge and Overhand Guide

Shuffling looks like a gesture with no mystery to it, until someone at the table complains that the same hands keep coming up, or a new deck starts to bend after the second game. There are really two separate questions behind it. One is technique: how to move the cards without exposing them, bending them or dropping them. The other is mathematics: how many times you need to repeat the move before the final order is genuinely unpredictable. This guide covers both, technique by technique, with what the mathematicians who studied the problem actually measured and what casino and tournament rules require.

How to shuffle cards: the techniques, from easiest to hardest

There are many ways to shuffle, but nearly all of them are variations on five basic moves. Before going through the steps, it helps to know what each one does to the deck, because they do not all mix equally well or treat the cards the same way.

The mixing column is the one that surprises people. The overhand, which is the most common way to shuffle at home in Britain and much of Europe, is by far the one that mixes least. The numbers are further down.

1. The overhand shuffle

This is the shuffle most of us learn as children: the deck held on its edge in one hand while the other hand peels off small groups of cards from one side to the other. In Spain it is called shuffling a la española, and it is the most widespread home shuffle in Europe and the Americas.

1. Hold the deck on its long edge in your dominant hand, thumb on one long side and fingers on the other, with the faces towards the palm of your other hand.
2. With the thumb of your other hand resting on the back of the top card, hold back a few cards as you lift your dominant hand.
3. Those cards fall into the palm of the receiving hand. Bring your dominant hand back down and repeat, dropping each group on top of the last.
4. Keep going until your dominant hand runs out of cards. That is one pass.
5. Do several passes and finish with a cut.

Looked at slowly, the overhand takes the deck in packets and stacks them in reverse order. The cards inside each packet stay together and in the same order. If the packets are large, which is what happens when you shuffle quickly, cards that were together stay together after many passes. That is why, if someone gathers up the cards of a trick or a run and only shuffles overhand, part of that combination can easily turn up again in the next hand.

2. The Hindu shuffle

It resembles the overhand, but the deck is held horizontally and the work is done by the other hand. Magicians use it a lot because it lets them control cards discreetly, and it is also a comfortable alternative for anyone who finds the overhand grip tiring.

1. Hold the deck face down in your dominant hand by the short ends: thumb at one end and middle finger at the other, with the index finger resting on top.
2. Your other hand comes in from the front and pinches a few cards off the top with the thumb and middle finger.
3. That hand draws the small packet away until it comes free and lets it drop into its palm. The index finger on the front end acts as a stop so the cards land square.
4. Go back for another packet and drop it on top of the first. Repeat until you are done.

The hand doing the work is the one receiving the cards, not the one holding them, and smoothness matters more than speed: small, even packets. In terms of mixing, it has the same problem as the overhand, because it also moves blocks of cards without interleaving them.

3. How to riffle shuffle on the table

This is the technique dealers use and the one that mixes most per shuffle, because it interleaves the cards of two halves instead of moving blocks. Doing it on the table has two further advantages: the cards stay low, so nobody sees the faces, and only the corners bend.

1. Place the deck face down on the table, lengthways. Cut off roughly the top half and set it beside the other, also lengthways.
2. Hold each half with your thumbs on the inner corner (the one nearest the other half), your index finger on top and your other fingers along the back long side.
3. Bring the two halves together in an inverted V, with the inner corners almost touching and the point of the V facing away from you.
4. Lift the inner corners slightly with your thumbs, bending the cards just enough, and release gradually so that the cards from the two halves fall alternately and overlap by a few millimetres.
5. Push the two halves into each other until they mesh and square the deck with your fingers, without lifting it off the table.

At first the cards fall in clumps. With practice they fall one or two at a time, which is what gives a good mix. The corners only need to overlap: there is no need to push one half fully into the other.

Here is how an ordered 12-card packet might look after one riffle if the top half was spades and the bottom half hearts. The cards interleave, but each half keeps its own order:

That detail, each half keeping its internal order, is the key to why a single riffle is not enough and why mathematicians talk about seven. We come back to it in the section on how many times to shuffle.

4. How to bridge shuffle: the riffle in the hands

This is the riffle you see in films: it is done with the deck in your hands and finishes with the «bridge», an arch in which the cards cascade back together with that familiar sound. It mixes exactly as well as the table riffle; the bridge is just an elegant way of bringing the two halves together.

1. Cut the deck into two halves and hold one in each hand, lengthways, with your thumbs on the inner short end and your other fingers on the outer short end.
2. Bring the halves together until the inner ends almost touch and bend each half slightly upwards with your thumbs.
3. Release the cards gradually with your thumbs so they fall interleaved, overlapping by no more than a couple of centimetres (under an inch).
4. For the bridge, place your thumbs on top, in the middle of the area where the two halves cross, with your other fingers underneath.
5. Push up with your fingers to bow the whole deck into an arch and ease off the pressure gradually: the cards slide and drop onto each other.
6. Square the deck.

The bridge arches the whole card, not just the corner, so it is the technique that punishes a deck most if you overdo it. A gentle arch is enough for the cards to fall. If you notice the deck has stayed curved after a session, square it up and bend it gently the other way, or leave it under a weight overnight. If the showy side interests you, the bridge is also one of the first moves you learn in cardistry for beginners.

5. The pile shuffle

You deal the cards one at a time into several piles, as if dealing to several players, and then stack the piles. It is common among collectible card game players and with children, because it needs no skill at all.

1. Deal the cards face down into five, six or seven piles, one card on each in turn.
2. When the cards run out, pick up the piles in any order and stack them.

6. The wash: also called chemmy, scramble or smooshing

This is the oldest and least technical method: you spread the cards face down on the table and stir them around with your palms in circular movements, then gather them back into a deck. It goes by many names in English: wash, scramble, chemmy, Irish shuffle or, in the slang of some mathematicians, smooshing.

1. Spread the cards face down on a smooth, clean surface, ideally a playing mat or baize.
2. With both hands flat, stir the cards in circular movements so they cross over one another. Make sure you move the ones at the edges too.
3. Keep it up for a good while: at least half a minute, preferably a full minute.
4. Gather the cards without turning them over, square the deck and follow with a couple of riffles and a cut.

Casinos use it mainly when a new deck comes into play, which arrives from the factory in suit order, and follow it with riffles. In poker it is usually skipped on ordinary hands because it is slow and takes up a lot of space. On the other hand, it is the perfect technique for children and for anyone who has trouble with their hands, as long as it is done for long enough (the reason is in the next section).

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How many times should you shuffle a deck of cards?

The figure that gets quoted is seven, and it has a precise origin. In 1992 the mathematicians Dave Bayer and Persi Diaconis published a paper in the Annals of Applied Probability with a playful title, «Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to Its Lair», in which they calculated exactly how likely each ordering of the deck is after a given number of riffle shuffles. Diaconis, a professor at Stanford, is also a magician with decades of experience shuffling cards.

To do the calculation they used a mathematical model of the human riffle, known as the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model: the deck is cut roughly in half and cards drop from each half with a probability proportional to the number of cards left in it. Tests with real shuffles showed that the model describes the way an ordinary person shuffles well.

What the numbers say

To measure how far a deck is from being perfectly mixed, Bayer and Diaconis used a distance that equals 1 when the deck is completely ordered (or completely predictable) and 0 when every ordering is equally likely. These are their results for 52 cards:

What is interesting about the table is not the seven itself but the shape of the curve. For four riffles the deck still holds a lot of information about its starting order; between the fifth and the seventh, that information collapses; and after that, further shuffling adds very little. Mathematicians call this sudden drop the cutoff phenomenon. Bayer and Diaconis also showed that the number of riffles needed grows very slowly with the size of the deck, because it depends on the logarithm of the number of cards: a double deck of 104 cards needs only about one and a half riffles more than a 52-card deck.

There is an intuitive way to see why four are not enough. As the twelve-card example shows, after one riffle the deck is made up of two ordered sequences interleaved. After two riffles, at most four; after three, eight; and so on, doubling each time. After five riffles there are at most 32 sequences, and reversing the order of a 52-card deck would take 52. In other words, after five riffles some orderings are still impossible, and many others are far more likely than they should be.

Six, seven or four? The fine print

The seven depends on how you define «random». In 2000 the mathematicians Lloyd N. Trefethen and Lloyd M. Trefethen measured mixing by a different criterion, the amount of information left (entropy), and concluded that six riffles are enough in practice. Diaconis himself has since explained that for games where suits do not matter, such as blackjack, about four riffles are sufficient, because the patterns left over cannot be exploited.

The three figures do not contradict each other: they answer different questions. Seven is the number that lets you relax for any game and any criterion; four is what many rulebooks require for ordinary games. What no source claims is that two or three riffles are enough for a game in which suit and sequence matter, such as bridge or poker. Back in 1990, when the New York Times reported on the research, the editor of The Bridge World remarked that bridge players usually shuffled about four times and that at some tournaments the hands were shuffled by computer.

The overhand: thousands of passes

For the overhand the figures are in a different league. The mathematician Robin Pemantle studied a model of this shuffle in 1989 and showed that the number of passes needed grows at least with the square of the number of cards; in 2006 Johan Jonasson pinned down the exact order, which is somewhat higher still. Applied to a 52-card deck, Diaconis sums it up as about 10,000 overhand passes to mix as well as seven riffles. Other, older popular estimates put it at around 2,500. Sources disagree on the exact figure but agree on what matters: thousands, not dozens.

The reason is the one we saw earlier: the overhand moves blocks without interleaving them. Computer simulations show that even after 100 passes many cards are still close to their starting position. This does not mean you have to stop shuffling overhand, only that it is worth combining with other techniques.

The wash: half a minute to a minute

For years nobody knew how long you need to wash a deck. Diaconis measured it experimentally: decks washed for 15 seconds failed tests of randomness (in some, up to ten pairs of cards were still together), while those washed for 30 seconds and for a minute passed them all. In later work with Soumik Pal he proposed a mathematical model of the movement. The practical conclusion: at least half a minute of washing, ideally a minute. The ten seconds people usually give it at home fall short.

What a perfect shuffle is: the faro

A curiosity that helps make sense of all this: if a riffle were perfect, interleaving exactly one card from each half, it would not mix anything. This perfect riffle is called the faro shuffle and is one of the hardest techniques in card magic. Eight perfect faros in a row, keeping the top and bottom cards in place, return a 52-card deck to its starting order. What makes the riffle random is precisely its imperfection: sometimes one card falls, sometimes two or three.

How to shuffle cards like a dealer: casino and tournament procedure

In a casino, shuffling is not just mixing: it is a procedure designed so that nobody, not even the dealer, can see or control the cards. Each casino sets its own sequence, but they all follow the same pattern.

1. Wash, only when a new deck is introduced (it comes in factory order) or at specific times set by the house.
2. Table riffles, usually two or three, with the cards kept very close to the felt: no more than two or three centimetres (about an inch) high.
3. Strip or box: the dealer pulls the deck apart into several blocks, roughly a fifth of the deck each, and stacks them in reverse order. This breaks up any clumps left by the riffle and makes it harder to track a particular card.
4. One more riffle. A typical sequence is riffle, riffle, strip, riffle.
5. Cut onto a cut card (cut card): a plastic card on which the deck is placed so that the bottom card is never exposed.

The whole process is done without lifting the cards off the table and without tapping the deck on its edge to square it, because lifting it exposes the bottom card. The casino riffle never uses the in-hand bridge.

What the rulebooks say

Poker rulebooks set out this procedure in summary form. Robert's Rules of Poker, by Bob Ciaffone, which many card rooms use as a basis and which has a version for private games, sets out the following for home play:

• The deck is always shuffled and cut before dealing.
• Three people should ideally be involved: whoever dealt the previous hand gathers and squares the cards, the new dealer shuffles and the player to the dealer's right cuts.
• There must be a minimum of four riffles.
• The cut must leave at least four cards in each portion.
• The bottom card is protected with a cut card; a joker will do.
• Any complaint about the shuffle or the cut must be made before looking at your own cards or before betting starts.

In tournaments, the rules of the Poker TDA (Tournament Directors Association), the standard reference for tournament directors, state that a hand begins with the first riffle, with the push of the automatic shuffler's button or with the dealer's push, and that deck changes happen on dealer changes or level changes, or when the house decides. Players may not ask for a deck change. When the rest of the deck has to be reshuffled after an error, the procedure is scramble, shuffle and cut.

If you host home games, adopting these rules avoids arguments. Our guide to running a home poker night covers the rest of the organisation, and the poker glossary explains terms such as burn card or dealer.

How to shuffle cards without bending them: mistakes that damage a deck

The way you shuffle is, along with humidity, what shortens the life of a paper deck the most. Most damage comes from a handful of habits that are easy to correct.

• Overdoing the bridge. Bending the cards too far leaves them bowed. The right arch is the one that lets them fall, no more.
• Always bending the same way. If you always riffle and bridge in the same direction, the deck ends up taking that curve. Straighten it now and then by bending it gently the other way.
• Riffling the whole card instead of the corner. On the table, lifting the corner is enough; the mix is the same and the card suffers less.
• Forcing the halves together. If the cards will not go in, the overlap is too large. Pushing hard bends the edges and ends up marking the corners.
• Tapping the deck on the table to square it. It batters the edges and exposes the bottom card into the bargain.
• Washing on a rough or dirty surface. The backs rub against the table: a mat or a clean tablecloth prevents marks and scratches.
• Shuffling with sweaty or greasy hands. Grease sticks to the card finish and makes the cards cling together, clump during the riffle and fall in blocks.

A deck with a bent corner or a visible mark is no longer fit for serious play, because that card can be recognised from its back. In our article on how to care for playing cards we explain how to break in a new deck, how to store it and how to rescue one that has bowed.

How to shuffle plastic cards: plastic and paper behave differently

Almost every deck on sale is made of card stock (layered paper with a coated surface finish). 100% plastic decks, like the ones many poker rooms use, behave differently in the hands.

With plastic cards the riffle comes more easily once you are used to it, because the cards are flexible and spring back, but it pays to go more slowly the first few times so they do not slip and scatter. With paper, the key is not to punish the cards with exaggerated bridges. If your table shuffles a lot and hard, a plastic deck from a brand such as Copag works out cheaper over time. To compare options, see our guide on which deck of cards to buy.

Size matters too. Bridge-size decks (about 57 mm or 2.25 in wide) are narrower than poker-size decks (about 63 mm or 2.5 in) at the same height, and many card rooms prefer them because they are easier to handle and shuffle, especially with small hands.

How to shuffle cards for kids and small hands

A full deck is large for the hand of a six or eight-year-old, and for many adults with weak fingers or joint problems too. There is no need to force the riffle: there are ways to shuffle well without any dexterity.

1. Start with the wash. It is the easiest technique, the one that mixes best without skill and the one children enjoy most. Just make sure it lasts long enough, at least half a minute.
2. Split the deck. Divide the deck into two or three small packs, overhand or riffle each one separately (with half a pack in each hand it is much easier), then swap them around and combine.
3. Use piles as an extra step. Dealing into piles is easy and fun, but pick the piles up in a different order each time and finish with a short wash.
4. Choose the right card size. A narrower bridge-size deck fits the hand better.
5. Practise the riffle with half a deck. When they want to learn the table riffle, let them start with 26 cards, 13 in each hand.

If you are looking for games to practise as a family, our list of card games has options for every age.

Automatic card shufflers

Automatic shufflers exist in two very different worlds: home gadgets and casino machines.

Casinos use shufflers because they save time (the Diaconis study estimates about 20% more hands per hour), because they reduce repetitive strain injuries among dealers and because they make cheating harder. At home, a shuffler is a convenience, not a guarantee: if you run the deck through only once, it mixes no better than a single riffle.

A simple routine for shuffling well at home

Putting it all together, here is a routine that mixes well, is kind to the deck and takes less than a minute:

1. If the deck is new or comes from a game where the cards ended up grouped (by suit, by tricks or by melds), wash it for a good half minute.
2. Do four riffles on the table, lifting only the corners. If you want to be safe, make it seven.
3. Somewhere in between, do a strip: pull the deck into four or five blocks and stack them in reverse.
4. Offer the cut to the player on your right, leaving at least four cards in each portion.

If the overhand is the only shuffle you know, do plenty of passes releasing just a few cards at a time and start with a wash. And if you play blackjack, where suits do not matter, four riffles are more than enough.

How much does a deck of cards cost?

From €5 to over €100. The 52 cards and the rules stay the same; this is what changes.

	To play€5.95	Designer€12.95	Premium€17.99	Collectible€34.94
Typical price	€5-9	€9-15	€15-30	€30 or more
What sets it apart	Classic casino design	Artist illustration on back and faces	Special inks, embossing and foil on the box	Limited print runs and gilded edges
Who it is for	Games at home	Playing with something beautiful	Gifts or cardistry	Collecting and display
Example	Tally-Ho Fan Azul	theory11 Medallion	The Sandwich Series (Luncheon Meat)	Kings Wild LOTR Two Towers Gilded
	See decks	See decks	See decks	See decks

Frequently asked questions

How many times should you shuffle a deck of cards?

Seven riffle shuffles for a 52-card deck to be practically random, according to the 1992 study by Bayer and Diaconis. For ordinary games, home game rules ask for a minimum of four riffles and a cut.

Does the overhand shuffle mix the cards properly?

Not much. The overhand moves blocks of cards without interleaving them, and you would need thousands of passes to match seven riffles. You can use it, but combine it with a wash or with riffles.

Why do dealers keep the cards low when they shuffle?

So that nobody sees any card, including the bottom one. That is why they shuffle with the cards a few centimetres above the felt, never tap the deck to square it and cut onto a cut card.

Does the bridge damage the cards?

If you overdo it, yes: it arches the whole card and the deck ends up bowed. A gentle arch is enough. If you notice a curve, bend the deck gently the other way or leave it under a weight overnight.

How long should you wash the cards?

At least half a minute, and ideally a minute. In Diaconis's experiments, decks washed for 15 seconds failed the randomness tests, while those washed for 30 seconds and a minute passed.

Does dealing cards into piles shuffle them?

Not on its own. If you always deal and pick up the same way, the result is a fixed rearrangement. It is useful for separating cards that were together and for counting the deck, but it has to be followed by another technique.

How do you shuffle a plastic deck?

The same way as a paper one, but more slowly at first, because plastic cards are slipperier. In return they stand up better to riffles and bridges and spring back if they bend.

Do automatic shufflers mix better than a person?

It depends on the machine. Home shufflers do the equivalent of one riffle per pass, so the deck needs several runs. Casino machines are designed to mix thoroughly, although even some of them have needed corrections after being analysed by mathematicians.

A deck that handles well shuffles better and lasts longer. If you are thinking of replacing yours, our shop has a wide selection of playing cards, from everyday playing decks to poker decks built to last through many hands.

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Keep exploring

• How to care for playing cards
• How many cards are in a deck
• Cardistry for beginners
• How to play Texas Hold'em poker
• Home poker night

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