shuffle the cards

present singular third person shuffles the cards · participle present shuffling the cards · participle past shuffled the cards · past shuffled the cards

1. figurativelyTo reorganize or restructure an organization or situation.

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

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

   5 more examples

   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.

   2005, Julia Pascal, Women in Theatre, page 103

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

   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.

   2017, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Impossible Revolution

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

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

   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.

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

2. figurativelyTo randomize an ongoing process.

   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.

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

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   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.

   1902, William Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, page 463

   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.

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

3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see shuffle, cards.

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

   2000, Kirsten Larsen, Princesses Pull-Out Posters and Game Cards, page 31