Just speculation on my part, but I wouldn't be shocked if certain player decisions or types of shuffles results in a certain configuration of cards, that gets into a certain state, kind of like strange attractors in chaos theory - or in a similar vein like how for superconductive materials, if a certain condition is met, i.e., a certain temperature is reached, the material exhibits a completely different phase, essentially going from unordered to ordered.

Offhand I can't think of a real life configuration of cards that would be consistently good or bad, no matter what happens at the table (player decisions, player cut, # of players changing, etc?)

Also there was the article by Snyder, that for some reason, if the cards are not shuffled, and at a table with few players, for some reason even a BS player would have an advantage - the article doesn't go into why this is the case, Snyder just ran a bunch of sims supporting this.