shuffle the cards

English

Verb

shuffle the cards (third-person singular simple present shuffles the cards, present participle shuffling the cards, simple past and past participle shuffled the cards)

1. (figuratively) To reorganize or restructure an organization or situation.
   • 2005, Julia Pascal, Women in Theatre, page 103:

     Things often look as though they have radically changed; whereas they have just taken on opposite appearances, as they so often do, to shuffle the cards and set people on a side track.

   • 2015, Peter Drucker, Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism, page 123:

     Lesbian bohemians whose economic status was less secure and whose lives were less would-be-conventional, like surrealists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, were sometimes less clearly inverted or more inclined to play with gender ('shuffle the cards') in proto-queer ways.

   • 2015, Eli Avidar, The Abyss: Bridging the Divide between Israel and the Arab World:

     It shuffled the cards in our region and changed the perception that Israel is an undefeatable country.

   • 2017, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Impossible Revolution:

     His example shows that the mukhabarat play a role that goes beyond dirty tricks: they are also adept at shuffling the cards in order to manipulate the minds and attitudes of the public.

   • 2022, Raphael Israeli, Human Rights and Human Development in the Arab and Islamic World:

     But the 1979 Islamic Revolution of Khumeini shuffled the cards, in fact unwittingly serving as the precursor of the Islamic Spring.

   • 2022, Simona Salvo, The School of Mathematics at Rome’s University Campus, page 264:

     When the university was reformed in the Eighties, changes in the organization of the School shuffled the cards in such a way that data does not allow us to compare numbers.

2. (figurative) To randomize an ongoing process.
   • 1902, William Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, page 463:

     Progress in one quarter only implies retrogression in another; human endeavor with its victories and its failures means no more than that the Absolute is shuffling the cards.

   • 2007, Luca Iandoli, Giuseppe Zollo, Organizational Cognition and Learning:

     This is the same as shuffling the cards and adding diversity to the system, that otherwise would have been excessively influenced by the choice of the initial population.

   • 2009, Joseph Seckbach, Divine Action and Natural Selection, page 749:

     Creatures therefore do NOT have to shuffle all the cards completely from scratch every time, so the probability of a viable result (and hence the probability of an improvement in fitness) is vastly higher than would be predicted by classical statistics.

3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see shuffle,‎ cards.
   • 2000, Kirsten Larsen, Princesses Pull-Out Posters and Game Cards, page 31:

     Shuffle the cards and deal out four cards to each player.

Translations

Translations

• French: rebattre les cartes (fr)

Further reading

• “shuffle the cards”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
• “shuffle the cards” in Idioms and phrases, TheFreeDictionary.com, Huntingdon Valley, Pa.: Farlex, Inc., 2003–2024.