How fast can experts memorise a deck, for context?

Well under a minute — the world record is around 13 seconds for a full 52-card deck.

Elite competitors, running a fluent PAO into a hyper-rehearsed palace, memorise an entire shuffled deck in seconds; the record sits near 13 seconds. That's not a different technique — it's exactly this pipeline (PAO + palace) executed with years of drilling behind automatic encoding and instant loci. It shows the ceiling; a motivated beginner memorising a deck in a few minutes is already doing the same thing, slower.

Go deeper:

• World Memory Championships (Wikipedia) — lists Speed Cards and the ~13-second record.
• Alex Mullen, memory athlete (Wikipedia) — first person under 20s — years-of-drilling context.