So two points of note.
I did not read all the posts above in detail but did do a search for the Faro Shuffle and got no results... So:
This is a shuffle where all the cards interweave absolutely perfectly (so a perfect riffle shuffle). There's quite a lot of maths behind this. For instance, 8 shuffles takes you back to the order you started shuffling the cards in. Martin Gardner talked about this a bit in at least one of his SA columns. The problem with the faro shuffle is it takes a long long time to learn... personally well over a year, and that was with the benefit of having been a practicing amateur magician for along time. Still if interested the book to look for is The Collected Works of Alex Elmsley, this really lays the foundations for mathematical faro work...
Another trick I came across whilst working towards an Ergodic Theory exam uses the Birkhoff Ergodic Theorem at its core. You can read about it in these notes: http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~cwalkden/ergodic-theory/lecture22.pdf
Owen.
