A riffle shuffle, in which the top half of the deck is placed in the left hand, and cards are then alternatively interleaved from the left and right hands. 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. The ordering of a deck of 52 cards after an in-shuffle is given by 27, 1, 28, 2, 29, 3, ... (OEIS A059952).
In general, in-shuffling a deck of cards once moves card
to the position originally occupied by the
th card (mod
) (Conway and Guy 1996). Therefore, in-shuffling an even
number
of cards
times when
is prime results in the original card order. This means that an ordinary deck of
52 cards is returned to its original order after 52 in-shuffles. The numbers of in-shuffles
needed to return a deck of
,
4, ... to its original order are 2, 4, 3, 6, 10, 12, 4, 8, 18, 6, 11, ... (OEIS A002326), which is simply the multiplicative
order of 2 (mod
).