this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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Unique against what? This almost sounded like the birthday problem, but there's only one deal?
Unique as in never having happened before in the history of cards.
We need to have an estimate of the number of hands ever dealt (I think), which isn't given in the infographic. I am suspecting you need a better estimate for the 50% calculation than a 99.999999% calculation, but I don't have the math to back it up.
The creator of this factoid doesn't have an estimate and is misrepresenting a basic permutation and assuming no hands have been dealt before.
When considering a full deck you don't really need to estimate the number of dealt hands, because any estimate that is anywhere close to realistic is completely negligible compared to 52!
We're talking: If every person that ever lived became 100 years old and shuffled one deck of cards every minute of their life, the number of shuffled decks in history is still in practice indistinguishable from zero when compared to 52!
14-17
What's your estimate of the number of shuffles in history?
5
~~Educated~~ guess. 😂
Ty, made me laugh!
5!
Between 43,589,000,000 and 177,843,000,000,000