After a Hold 'Em hand is played out in a home game (and some casinos), a human gathers the cards that were played, and just before he starts shuffle, it might be safe to assume that the deck is arranged in a somewhat disordered state. Now the dealer shuffles a few times to randomize the sequence of the cards, and then deals.
But in an online game, after a hand is played out, does the computer “gather” the cards in some “disordered” state or does the computer arrange the deck in some definite pre-shuffle order, and then shuffles sufficiently to randomize the sequence of cards?
I suspect the answer is “none of the above,” and if so, I hope you’ll elaborate.
I suspect the simplest thing a computer would do is just completely randomly rearrange the cards. Anything else would reveal information and potentially give the better information.
It depends on the site. Some sites randomly generate a new deck for every hand, and then deal from that deck. Others just randomly generate cards as they are needed. No site I’m aware of burns cards before the flop, turn or river.
Are you asking: does a computer shuffling cards mimic the method that a human used to shuffle? No, probably not. It would be harder and slower to code that way. The shuffling routine for a certain online card game works by taking a sample of random numbers (the tail end of the clock way, way past the decimal works) and using that as a seed to generate the order of cards top to bottom. It’s far more random that a human shuffling. And yes, you will see clumps of cards and weird things happen in a truly random environment.
I imagine most online casinos are either using a hardware RNG or some external element like ping times to generate their random numbers. There were a few exploits in the early days with hackers figuring out the software RNG code and using that to their advantage.
There are two methods
One is to randomly shuffle a deck of cards (yes I know it is not truly random, but it is a heck of a lot more random than a human can ever do), then deal them and determine the winning hand at the end. The other way is to have every possible hand “predealt” along with the winning hand pre-determined then “randomly” select one of those hands.
Or, as I mentioned, and as some sites do it, the cards can be generated randomly one at a time (with duplicates being discarded and replacements re-generated) as they are needed.
Here is PokerStars’ information on how it shuffles.
Here is Paradise Poker’s information on how it shuffles.
This is true. However, randomness per se often isn’t really needed: Mere unpredictability will suffice. I presume this is the case here.
On the other hand, you can get random bits from the environment. On a desktop machine that has a user constantly typing away on it, measuring the time between keystrokes is a pretty good randomness source. If you want to go all-out, you can buy a hardware dongle that contains a radioactive piece of metal and a Geiger counter that measures the time between decays. There are other methods as well.