Now let us look at the same image, except with realistic grabs and riffles. We see below that most of the cards still come from these two areas, although they are not interleaved perfectly and several unexpected cards are mixed in. However, we can still see that a large number of cards from the bottom eighth of the original stack end up in the top quarter of the final stack. Remember that the stack on the left comes from the discard tray. So, the cards at the bottom are the first cards placed into the tray (assuming that the plugging did not disrupt this). This means that if we count the first 39 cards as they are placed in the tray, we will have a fair idea of the count of the cards at the top of the stack after the shuffle.

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger