Faro Shuffle
Alternate name
Definition
A riffle shuffle, also called the Faro shuffle, is a shuffle in which a deck of 2n cards is divided into two halves. The top half of the deck is placed in the left hand, and cards are then alternatively interleaved from the left and right hands (an in-shuffle) or from the right and left hands (an out-shuffle). Using an in-shuffle, a deck originally arranged as 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 would become 5 1 6 2 7 3 8 4. Using an out-shuffle, the deck order would become 1 5 2 6 3 7 4 8. Riffle shuffles are used in card tricks (Marlo 1958ab, Adler 1973), and also in the theory of parallel processing .
