I know. It sounds like a stupid question. It seems obvious that the answer is no.
The reason I ask is because of something on the Wikipedia page on card games. Specifically, the section on shuffling.
How can “player experience can suffer when the cards are shuffled too well”?
What was the reasoning behind the decision of the “German skat court”?
Sorry for replying to my own post, but I have an idea about the skat court reasoning.
Their concern may not have been so much that the cards would be too random, but rather that they would more random during that player’s deals than they were for the other players’ deals. This difference might cause some unfair advantage or disadvantage for the the one-handed player.
It’s been demonstrated by statistical analysis that seven true shuffles will randomize a deck beyond most persons’ ken. If I knew the full order of a deck to start, and you shuffled it seven times, I would have a mere 0.5% edge in knowing which card followed any given card. Of course, I shouldn’t know what the order of the deck was in the first place, and it also assumes I am a savant who can quickly remember the order of all 52 cards. For all intents and purposes, the deck has been randomized.
Now, most people aren’t perfect shufflers. They might miss shuffling half of the deck, or they might riffle the cards without actually shuffling all of them (some card sharps do that on purpose). So I wouldn’t say that seven shuffles always randomize the deck, as some stats people assume from this analysis. Those stats people, always ignoring the human element. But unless your game includes the savant I mentioned above, seven shuffles should do it.
Can you shuffle the deck too well? No, if the intent is to randomize cards. But as the graph under “Card Prediction Wager” in the linked article demonstrates, there are diminishing returns to shuffling more than seven times. While two shuffles give me a 3% edge in knowing what card is next, and seven shuffles drop that edge to about 0.5%, ten shuffles will only decrease the edge to ~0.2%. It’s a bit of a waste of time to go further, unless you’re a casino and you’re letting a shuffling machine do it for you. That, I suppose, is one reason why the Wiki article calls additional shuffles detrimental to player experience.
But there’s another, more subtle reason. Like Bridge, Skat is a game in which suit distribution is critical to how the hand is played. Think of how when you play a Bridge hand, how the cards are piled together before the shuffle. If you picked up the cards and looked at them, you’d see that the suits aren’t evenly distributed, but they’re in clumps through the deck. That’s because most tricks contain three or four of one suit. If you shuffled the deck, you’d see fewer of those clumps with every shuffle.
If you dealt out a Bridge hand with an unshuffled deck, it wouldn’t be such a big deal–you deal them out one by one, so the clumps get broken up as you deal. But when you deal out a Skat hand of ten cards apiece, you deal them in groups of “three-four-skat-three” (3 cards to each player in turn, then four cards to each player in turn, a widow of two cards to the middle, and three more cards to each player). The clumps of suits tend to stay together more, because you’re dealing out adjacent cards. The more times you shuffle the deck for a Skat hand, the fewer clumps you’d get.
What does that mean? In a nutshell, less common suit distribution. Skat is all about betting on long suits, just like Bridge, only even more so because it’s a one-against-two bidding game. So when someone gets a long suit and makes a big bid, it’s a more exciting game than when all three players get about the same suit distribution and nobody can really make a solid bid. Belote is about the same way, though I guess the French would rather get the game over more quickly whereas in Germany Skat is SERIOUS BUSINESS (as evidenced by the very fact that there is a “German Skat Court”).
So, in conclusion: shuffle the cards as much as you want if you want randomization. If you don’t want randomized cards, shuffle them as little as you want.
Another issue is that a “perfect” shuffle (where you divided the deck exactly in half, and then exactly alternated between halves in riffing them back together) doesn’t actually randomize the deck, and will in fact return the deck to its original order after a small number of shuffles. Very few humans can reliably do a perfect shuffle, but a shuffling machine might.
I have my doubts on this theory. You’d have to have pretty sharp motor skills to pull that trick off–humans can’t necessarily do perfect shuffles, but it randomizes a deck better than no shuffle. And, as we know from the laws of entropy, once we start to randomize anything, it takes significantly more energy (and luck in this case) to bring it back to its original order.
It’s stuff like this that gives German scat a bad name.
So yes, a series of perfect riffles can recycle the deck. But you would have to shuffle it exactly either 8 or 52 times, presuming that the machine does perfect shuffles, and that the deck is always split exactly in half, and that the machine consistently does the same type of shuffle (in or out). I think it’s extremely unlikely that this would occur.
It looks like you may be making the incorrect assumption that a perfect shuffle increases entropy. In fact, it doesn’t. A not-quite perfect shuffle will do so however, which is what most humans will accomplish. However, there are magicians who can pull off perfect shuffles reliably.
Well, I suppose I could have said “for all except 25 people out of the billions of people in the world, shuffling increases entropy”.
But the point stands that for games like Skat and Belote (and for Pirate Bridge and Towey and a few other games I can’t think of right now), you don’t want the deck to be altered too much in any way, because you want unusual suit distribution. That, I think, is the question davidm is asking here.
Only slightly related to the thread topic, but I found it interesting to learn that the number of potential ways for a standard deck of 52 cards to be shuffled is ~8x10[sup]67[/sup]. If you include the jokers (rare that a game uses them, but humor me) this increases to ~2x10[sup]71[/sup]
By comparison, our best guess estimate for the number of atoms in the universe is in the range of 10[sup]80[/sup].
The reason the “player experience might suffer” might not have anything to do with the cards, but rather the time the dealer is shuffling is time the player isn’t playing. This means less money for the house and less entertainment for the player.
Most casinos rotate between two decks, using a shuffling machine to shuffle the deck that isn’t in play at the time. It just makes sense even without the “squeeze the suckers more quickly” argument–think of how difficult shuffling a four-pack, six-pack, or eight-pack pile of cards to ensure sufficient randomization would be.
Or 16 or 24 or 32 or 40 … for an out shuffle.
After reading the rules to skat, I think I understand what’s going on.
It’s a 3-player game played with a 32-card deck. Play involves taking tricks, so after a round is done, there will be 10 piles containing three cards of the same suit (ignoring trumps and the two extra cards).
Skat also has unusual dealing rules. Players are dealt cards in clumps – 3 in a row, then 4 in a row, then another 3 in a row.
I’m guessing that skat games are more interesting when the suits are fairly evenly distributed across the three players. It plays better if everyone has a mix of all four suits. You don’t want one player to wind up with all the hearts, for example.
A couple of quick shuffles is just enough to break up the 3-card clumps from the previous hand. Then the dealer deals out cards in 3 or 4 card runs, so you can be pretty sure that all the cards you get in a run come from different tricks in the previous game. This increases the likelihood that the suits will balance after the deal is done.
Basically, the unusual dealing mechanic is designed to dovetail with a light shuffle of the partially organized deck to minimize the chances of getting an uninteresting round.
I was nominated to the German skat court, but got filibustered and they never took a vote.
Bastards.
After reading this, I changed my mind and think that it doesn’t make a difference assuming, of course, that the shuffle is not faked (as in the magician example presented earlier).
Random doesn’t mean a normal distribution. That would be unnatural.
And for what is worth, I agree about the 7 shuffle rule. I think automatic shufflers use that as well. No cite.
You win 
I just Googled “German scat”
WTF does ***that ***have to do with CARDS ?!?!?!? :eek:
The home poker nights I have been too over the years with a variety of different friends have used two decks for this reason as well.
Also in Skat (as in Sheapshead), the cards are dealt out in clumps of 2-4 cards. Since these games require you to follow suit when playing, the deck will naturally have groups of suits together when ready to be shuffled. A short shuffle combined with dealing out groups of cards increases the chances that a player will be short suited, which makes for a good game.