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Quite.
In all honesty, even the use of hardware RNG's is complete overkill.
The simple action of any reasonable software RNG taken together with the fact that these servers deal between hundreds and over a thousand hands a second is more than enough to guarantee adequate randomness.
I am not sure I agree with this but I have not thought much about 'adequate randomness' in terms of playing poker. Here are my initial thoughts. One of these three things is always true:
a) the shuffle is purely random
b) not all of the 52! shuffles are possible.
c) all shuffles are possible but not all are equally likely.
If 'adequate randomness' means something other than 'pure randomness' then either b or c is true.
In case b) if the possible shuffles are known it may be possible to predict that the next card to fall can never be a given card.
In case c) we have a similar situation except we only know that one card is more likely to fall than another. Either of these seems inadequate.
'adequate randomness' may be possible if one of b) or c) is true, but it is somehow not possible to know which shuffles are impossible / less likely / more likely. I am not sure it is possible for this to be the case, though... would have to research more into it.
It seems like needlessly sticky water for the sites to get into instead of using a hardware RNG though
Last edited by Pyromantha; 07-11-2009 at 07:12 PM.