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The milk and Monge shuffles and three self-working card tricks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2025

Stanley R. Huddy
Stanley R. Huddy*
Affiliation:
Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck NJ 07666 USA e-mail: srh@fdu.edu
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Extract

Well-known shuffles, such as the riffle shuffle and the standard over- hand shuffle [1], are meant to randomise the order of the cards, making it difficult to predict the appearance of specific cards in games like poker or blackjack. However, shuffles have a different purpose in self-working card tricks: they reorder the cards so that the position of the target card (the card revealed at the end of the trick) is known to the magician, but not to the observer. This Article generalises three self-working card tricks that are based on the milk and Monge shuffles and have appeared on social media.

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Type
Articles
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 109 , Issue 576 , November 2025 , pp. 411 - 418
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Copyright
© The Authors, 2025 Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Mathematical Association

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References

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