Analysis of casino shelf shuffling machines (Q363867)

Many casinos routinely use mechanical card shuffling machines. The authors were asked to evaluate a new shelf shuffler. This leads to new probability, new combinatorics and to some practical advice which was adopted by the manufacturer. The interplay between theory, computing, and real-world application is developed. Finally, this paper reports some ad hoc tests which show that a single iteration of a \(10\)-shelf shuffler is not sufficiently random, and a simple alternative is suggested.