Poker News

Shuffle Master automatic shuffler at the new MGM poker room

Why is poker so entertaining to us? Part of its appeal is that you are rarely in the same situation twice. Variability. Imagine the number of combinations there are in a shuffled deck of 52 cards [It’s approximately 8?10^67 -Ed.]. Combine that with the number of players with varying play styles you’re likely to see, and you’ve got quite a decision space in which to act. Just when you thinkyou’ve seen it all, another deal of the cards makes you shake your head. The foundation of our pastime lies in the concept of a fair shuffle. Offline or online, a proper, random rearrangement of the cards to start each hand is paramount.

Prior to the existence of online poker, humans were responsible for randomizing the status of the deck. For those of us who’ve played in the brick and mortar games, we’ve seen dealers perform a relatively standard shuffling procedure: split the deck into halves, riffle them together, repeat. Research indicates that after seven such sequences, the deck is effectively random. Note that the random status of the deck requires that the deck is shuffled imperfectly . A perfect shuffle is one where a card from each half interleaves with a card from the other half through the entirety of the shuffle. These perfect shuffles are thankfully difficult; performing them allows the dealer to control the deck’s order ? far from random.

While a human dealer’s shuffle manages to introduce some form of randomness to the process, there is the issue of speed. Humans can only shuffle so fast, and in many players’ minds no dealer is fast enough. Enter the automatic, machine-based dealer. Companies like Shufflemaster have invented faster shuffling devices which can greatly speed up the game of poker in the brick and mortar environment. The question of randomness still remains. How can a machine create an effective random shuffle?

Perusing the United States patent office gives us some clues. Similar to the shuffle process described above, the Shufflemaster device splits the deck into two stacks and temporarily stores them in separate chambers. The device then randomly selects cards from each half and refills the main chamber. By replicating the human shuffle in this manner, the machine can greatly speed up the game and maintain the integrity of a fair random order of cards.

In the online world, there is no need to replicate the process of the human shuffle. Programmers certainly could write code to do so, however, that process is inefficient and more effective techniques can accomplish the same task. Unfortunately, computers are not very random devices. They are particularly predictable, and when given explicit instructions they follow them every time.

How best then to introduce randomness into a computer program. Many online sites describe the process used to seed their random number generators. Many use the random movements of users’ mice. Others use external thermal-based devices that provide a sufficient form of unpredictability to the system. Even the left-over bits from a time stamp on a client’s PC can do the trick. If an online site is forthcoming and honest, a description of their shuffle algorithm can usually be found.

Just remember, that no matter how long you live, no matter how many virtual tables you can play simultaneously, you’ll never see every possible shuffle. Next time you’re lamenting that bad beat, realize that there are billions more to come.

John “BadBlood” Drohan is an engineer by day and a poker player by night. He can be found playing online at several major poker sites or offline at various home games throughout the Upstate Carolina area. He frequently blogs about his adventures at http://badbloodonpoker.blogspot.com/

Filed under: Poker News