Though a long-time blackjack dealer might feel like they have shuffled thousands of cards in their lifetime, against a number this big, their rearrangements are irrelevant. This is the nature of probabilities with such great numbers. To put that in perspective, even if someone could rearrange a deck of cards every second of the universe’s total existence, the universe would end before they would get even one billionth of the way to finding a repeat. It seems unbelievable, but there are somewhere in the range of 8x10 67 ways to sort a deck of cards. No one has or likely ever will hold the exact same arrangement of 52 cards as you did during that game.
Would you believe every time you gave the whole deck a proper shuffle, you were holding a sequence of cards which had never before existed in all of history? Consider how many card games must have taken place across the world since the beginning of humankind. Think of your last card game – euchre, poker, Go Fish, whatever it was.
