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The shuffling question What is a safe and accurate technique for shuffling cards? reminded me of a recent game of Munchkin with many expansions that taxed our shuffling endurance to the limit. My wife picked up a cheap shuffler locally but it has several problems: The left side doesn't draw cards as effectively as the right, so it always has remaining cards. It also deposits the cards into an annoying tray which is difficult to remove and prone to spilling the cards. It actually takes far longer to rotate a normal deck through the machine than to riffle it by hand. We had hoped it would speed up Cribbage games (with many short hands) but we went right back to alternating between two decks.

Can anyone recommend an effective, fast card shuffling machine?

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  • Do you want answers about machines people have experience with that they would NOT recommend for your particular application? I have one I love, but would never use for shuffling one deck, nor would I use it for game cards that couldn't be replaced, as it's hard on cards.
    – Adam Wuerl
    Feb 16, 2011 at 23:01
  • Any information is useful. Perhaps there's not one machine suitable for Munchkin and single-deck applications.
    – Ben Jackson
    Feb 16, 2011 at 23:50
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    Elsewhere I saw an interesting idea: If you have a lot of Munchkin expansions you will have such huge door/treasure piles that you could treat them like the question cards in Trivial Pursuit. Just use them sequentially for a while and only shuffle infrequently.
    – Ben Jackson
    Sep 11, 2011 at 18:51

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I own this 6-deck shuffling machine. I can highly recommend it for the specific circumstances we purchased it for: shuffling lots (4 decks) of expendable (i.e. cheap to replace) cards. We just run the decks through, cut a few times, and repeat. Say 3 or 4 times. It fed evenly from each side for us, but I could see an identical model not not working as well; it's not like its precision machinery.

We like it because the only real way to shuffle that many cards by hand is to split the deck up into multiple piles to be shuffled by humans and then combined, re-parsed out, and reshuffled. This way is much faster.

Reasons I would not recommend this machine for your purposes:

  • it's not worth the trouble to load it for a single deck (although for Munchkin with expansions perhaps it would work)
  • it also has a tray, although we didn't have problems with it
  • it's murder on cards (they're technically riffled, but get slammed together so hard the edges start to break down) we replaced the decks fairly frequently
  • you still have to strip, since this machine only riffles

It looks like there are professional models that riffle and strip, but they're expensive, like $500 instead of the $15 we paid.

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  • That looks like the exact machine we tried (in a 2 deck size) that I referred to in my question.
    – Ben Jackson
    Feb 22, 2011 at 0:52
  • So perhaps my review is no surprise then. I think a machine for shuffling less than four decks just doesn't make sense. Even Vegas hand shuffles single-deck blackjack.
    – Adam Wuerl
    Feb 22, 2011 at 1:08
  • So this model would not be very effective for something like Magic the Gathering, due to wear on the cards.
    – corsiKa
    Feb 13, 2013 at 18:37
  • This machine is extremely loud in my opinion. After looking for a while, I gave up on finding a shuffler for home games. The only one I thought could be good cost hundreds of dollars. (by Shuffletech or something)
    – anton1980
    Oct 29, 2015 at 17:45
  • @anton1980 Yes, I can confirm it’s crazy loud.
    – Adam Wuerl
    Oct 30, 2015 at 2:19

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