There is No 'Right' Shuffle

This is an open letter to brick-and-mortar casino poker room managers, floorpeople, and dealers:

First, thank you. You folks have a very hard job – keeping poker players happy. And yet, most of you perform your role professionally and with good humor. We realize that without you, we'd have no public poker games; that would be truly unthinkable. So, for the services you provide, and the smiles you give us – thank you.



Now, with that said, we need to have a talk about shuffles, deals, and (specifically) misdeals. I want to make a couple of things clear:



1. There is no "right" or "wrong" shuffle. The intent of shuffling the deck is to make the cards come out randomly. A particular shuffle is no different than any other shuffle, as long as they are both random.



2. The cards are all the same on the back. As long as you haven't seen the front of two cards, there is no difference between them.



So, what are the implications of this? I call your attention to the poker room of a major Las Vegas Strip casino, during the World Series of Poker. I was sitting in a limit hold'em game, getting killed but having an enjoyable time. The players were pleasant, the dealers and staff enjoyable, and there was no smoking; it was as good as poker gets without winning. One of the few zillion poker hands dealt that evening in Las Vegas was distributed on our table. But unlike most of those hands, one of the players ended up with three cards.



So, this was easily solved: The player spread his three cards out facedown. The dealer reached over and took one of them. He exposed that card and placed it on top of the deck as the burn card. The only reason he needed to expose the card was that the player might have looked at all three, and of course it wouldn't have been fair if only he knew that, for example, the 7 was out of action. Anyway, with that done, the game continued.



But that's not what happened. The dealer said, "Darn – misdeal," and took back all the cards! This apparently was house policy. And the players nodded sagely – anything else would give you the wrong deal. OK, that violates my statement No. 1 above: There is no wrong shuffle. It was a different shuffle than what we'd have gotten if the player hadn't gotten an extra card, but so what? So was the shuffle we got when the dealer pulled all the cards in and shuffled all over again. That shuffle was just as different, and yet everybody was OK with it. But we'd wasted precious time that could have been spent playing poker by shuffling an already shuffled deck instead.



Now, I understand poker players having theories about "right" and "wrong" shuffles. In fact, I'm delighted that they have them – as long as they also maintain their theories about lucky seats, deck changes, and other voodoo. But I expect better from the people running poker rooms.



Let me ask you something. Suppose that our dealer deals each of us two cards, and then (without looking at our cards) we pass our hand one player to the left. Have we changed the outcome of the hand? Almost certainly. Is it any less random than the original deal? Absolutely not. In fact, we can easily envision a parallel poker universe in which passing your hand (unseen) one to the left is part of the standard protocol. Poker works just as well in that universe as it does in this one.



Occasionally, when I've gotten my first card in a poker game, I've turned to the guy next to me and said, "I haven't looked. Wanna swap?" Of course, there are lots of reasons why this is a bad idea, but any effect on the randomness of the game isn't one of them.



Here's another example: I heard a story about a hold'em game at the WSOP in which the guy on the button got only one card. There was action, and then it got around to him. "I've got only one card," he said. I don't remember (or maybe it wasn't clear) whether he'd just realized that or knew it all along. If the latter, he needs to learn some manners. A great hue and cry ensued, floorpersons were called, and so on. I think they ruled that his hand (such as it was) was dead. It was a mess.



I don't get it. The dealer should have given him a card and gotten on with the game. Although, I grant that anytime something like this happens, it would be well to count the stub. In dramatic situations, you might remove the deck from the game (after the hand) and spade it, to ensure that nothing untoward happened. But please note that none of the remedies that are currently in use do any such checks; they're all about "right shuffle" voodoo.



There are two questions that we should ask in misdeal situations:



1. Is the deal still random? If so, the deal is fine. The important point is that all random deals are indistinguishable from each other (from the players' perspective), so it doesn't matter which one we get.



2. Does one player have knowledge about a card that others don't? If so, you have to correct that. Thus, my point that a dealer taking an extra card from a player should expose (and burn) the card, which ensures that nobody knows more about the dead card than anybody else.



Once those two criteria are met, you have a perfectly legitimate deal and should get on with the game.



If you must have a motivation beyond, "It's the right thing to do," how about: "It makes more money." After all, when you're going through the whole shuffling rigmarole twice, you're wasting time and costing yourself rake.



Bet I got your attention now.



So, streamline your misdeal procedures: If you can recover a random deal about which nobody knows any more than anybody else, you've got a poker game – so get on with it. Leave the randomness myths and voodoo to the players.

With deepest respect and warmest regards,

Lee H. Jones



P.S. While I'm here, let me clear up some online poker voodoo, too.



Question: Do you (an online poker site) shuffle a single deck of cards and deal from it, or do you take a random card each time?



Answer: It varies. PokerStars shuffles a 52-card deck, and then starts dealing from the top. Some other sites do that, as well, while other sites choose a card randomly from the deck each time a card is needed. Either approach works just fine as long as you don't put the cards back in the deck ("without replacement" is the official probability and stats term). And you can bet that the deal is just as random (if not more so) as the shuffle done in a brick-and-mortar cardroom.



Q: Do you "burn" a card before putting out (for instance) the flop in an online game?



A: PokerStars does not burn a card. I'm not aware of what other sites do, but it doesn't make a bit of difference either way. Note that the purpose of burning a card is to protect the deck; that is, if a card is marked, by leaving a burn card on top, nobody can see the markings on the card that will actually be used in the hand. This obviously is unnecessary in the online world. Since burning a card would take a microsecond (one-millionth of a second) or two, it doesn't affect the performance of the game, either. Note that a site choosing to randomly select a card from the deck each time it wants one has no way to "burn" a card. I suppose the site could randomly select a card and then discard it. Personally, I couldn't program that with a straight face.

"Lord knows I'm a voodoo chile"

Lee Jones is the poker room manager for PokerStars.com, and the author of the best-selling book Winning Low-Limit Hold'em, now in its third edition.