When the casino changes cards, washes them all over the table to get them out of sequence, then shuffles them for the first time, is this bad? The cards are going to be somewhat less than random than they were before they changed cards. Does this give the house an added advantage?
He's not on that much of a tangent. There are 52! ways to shuffle a deck: 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883 277824000000000000, some of them are beneficial to the house, some are beneficial to the player.Originally Posted by Rainmaker
There are so many ways to shuffle a deck, that each time you shuffle, the odds are that no one else in the history of time has shuffled the cards in that exact same order!
I think you're going on a tangent. I realize it may take a complicated analysis to answer, but it was a simple question posed to anyone with knowledge. I'm not really looking to analyze the non-randomness of shuffles, although I am in essence inquiring a bit about that subject.
Yes! It would be MUCH better for the player if the casino did not shuffle the new cards. However, almost all casinos will do it. You just have to play with whatever information you can get.
Why?
How?
-Sonny-
The high cards will be slightly clumped together and so will the low; I thought it was common knowledge that a high card is slightly more likely than a low to follow a queen after changing cards. I don't know how this would give the house an added advantage, that's why I asked if it does.
It's not at all a tangent, it's a primordially important point for you to understand. The point in randomness as a result of series of shuffles isn't to accumulate it over a long period so that 4 hours after the deck's been opened, it's "more random" than during the first few hands after it's been newly opened and shuffled. It's so that the resulting order after the shuffle has not preserved a sufficient amount of information from the order it had before the shuffle.
It doesn't matter if the deck is in new deck order or in any one of the 52! combinations it could be in before it's shuffled. A sufficiently random shuffle will ensure that the order after the shuffle is not relatable to the order before the shuffle. That's the point of shuffling the deck. Not to accumulate randomness over time and hands, but to immediately randomize the deck before the next hand. The new deck that's shuffled isn't "somewhat less random" than the deck it replaced, it's "sufficiently random" that its state after the shuffle isn't deducible from its state before the shuffle. Just like when the old deck was shuffled.
No, that will only happen if the shuffle is inadequate (and only certain shuffles in certain conditions). An adequately random shuffle will not have consistent clumps like that. Your so-called "common knowledge" is neither common nor knowledge. "Occasional belief" might be more correct.
And to forestall the question, the way to exploit inadequate shuffles is to track the shuffle, not assume high cards will clump.
Last edited by MidniteToker; 09-13-2013 at 03:05 PM.
I think what Rainmaker was inquiring about is that after the FIRST shuffle, which includes the wash, is there going to be more clumping AND if so, is there an advantage either way? A sufficient wash and good shuffle mixes the cards so there can’t really be an advantage to house or player. Should 6 new decks be insufficiently washed and shuffled there could be an advantage to the player if he could track it. Even if he knew it was not washed enough there might be an advantage, but the dealers are trained well in this skill. I have never heard anyone talk of this in any way before.
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