I am too busy to determine if you are right or wrong, I suspect you are right.

Random is a theoretical concept. I do not believe anything can truly be random. For practical purposes what we refer to as random should probably be referred to as unpredictable.

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I clicked the link, read about 3 paragraphs, and then made an airplane noise as I flew my hand over my head.

Even unpredictable doesn't describe it. I haven;t put any real thought into this, but I suspect the result is in topology or measure theory.

A simple observation about probability, while not directly related, will show these things are far more complex than they appear.

Pick a real number on the interval [0,1]. What did you pick?

Mathematically this may be correct. But for our purposes in a cardroom what we are trying to acheive is unpredictability.

Your math is useless against me as I do not understand it.


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Leaning into my metaphysical guesswork some more, I also believe this is incorrect. As examples, brownian motion, radioactive decay, and cosmic noise are all considered to be physical manifestations of true randomness. Of course, there are those who disagree (determinists).

Once again, apologies for the derail.

It's yes and no on that.

The 20 hand shuffled decks probably will look more similar, but on the other hand, if you did this experiment forever, and the shufflemaster decks never looked the same (or never came out exactly suited) it also wouldn't be truly random.

"I want the floor here now! There's been a J on the flop like 20-25% of the time!!"

I would not consider the last deck, taken as a whole, random.

And yet there isn't a casino anywhere that I am aware of that will just allow a fresh deck to be placed in the Shufflemaster without it being hand shuffled first.

Usually washed and shuffled first.

I repeat: It's just a waste of time to placate the Luddites at the table.

Place a washed & shuffled deck into a Shufflemaster and George gets pocket Aces cracked on the first hand.
George mumbles.

Place a fresh deck into a Shufflemaster and George gets pocket Aces cracked on the first hand.
George screams bloody murder.

Now if Phil Ivey wanted the cards put into the Shufflemaster a certain way, I might get suspicious of the efficacy of the randomization routine.

Yes, we do a lot of dumb things to satisfy the tinfoil hats.

I have never worked in a casino which required a shuffle before putting the deck in the shufflemaster.

A wash of the deck allows a greater opportunity to make sure the backs are not marked up. just spreading the deck don;t give a view of the whole card.

A whole lot of this.

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A given card is random if its value is independent of its placement in the sequence of cards in the deck and therefore cannot be predicted based on knowledge of another part of the sequence. The deck is random if the statistical distribution of the cards is normal, though of course 52 cards is a small sample so putting a 4 flush on the board isn't unusual even though the average sequence of 4 cards is rainbow. But if five players tabled a flush in Hold Em, I'd probably check how "random" the stub looked.

A well-shuffled deck is random in both senses, of course. You could have a deck that is random in the second sense but not the first by picking a random but known sequence in which to order the cards. Actually since this is what the Shufflemaster does, and since I'm sure it uses a pseudorandom number generator, someone who knew the exact order of the cards before they were put into the shuffler, as well as knowing the internal state of the shuffler's program, could predict the order of the cards in the shuffled deck. Not even a dealer intent on cheating could reasonably know these things though.

This is nothing more than variance. Most people remember the time they went to the casino for 8 hours and never got better than 77 and lost 2 or 3 buy ins, but they don't remember the 4 hour session from 2 weeks ago in which they had several large pocket pairs, hit a flush against a straight, and had a set over set situation in which they won a 350 bb pot and racked up a big winner. They believe all winning sessions come from their great play, but all losing sessions are due to evil forces that are plotting against them.

The distribution of the cards would follow a uniform distribution, not normal.

You're right, my bad.