Abstract
The nine card problem is a magic trick performed by shuffling nine playing cards according to a set of rules. The magic is that a particular card will always reappear. The success of this trick can be easily explained by considering the lengths of the words in the names of playing cards, which define the shuffling rules. In this paper, we use permutations to prove that the trick will always work. We then use this methodology to generalize the trick to any number of cards with shuffles according to different rules.