Did you know there are more ways you can arrange a deck of cards than the number of atoms on Earth?

Every player knows that a deck of blackjack cards has 52 cards, but you probably never thought about how many combinations that will result in.

Some of the more superstitious gamblers may believe that winning at blackjack depends on luck or on how the cards are shuffled. But it turns out that any time you pick up a well deck of card that has been shuffled well, it is almost certain that you are in fact holding a unique arrangement of cards, which has never been seen before and might not exist ever again.

Factorials explained

In the following TedEd animation, Yannay Khaikin explains how factorials can be used to establish the exact number of permutations in one single deck of cards.

“There are 52 factorial ways of arranging 52 cards,” he says. “The number of possible arrangements is 8.07, times ten to the 67th power. Or roughly 8 followed by 67 zeros. If a new permutation of 52 cards were written out every second, starting 13.8 billion years ago, when the Big Bang is thought to have occurred, the writing would still be continuing today and for millions of years to come.”

So there are a lot of ways to arrange a deck of 52 cards,more than the number of atoms on Earth!

Watch the full video to find out more: