I caught a bit of the National Heads Up Poker Championship on Hulu and the way they shuffled the cards was one I never seen before. It involved dumping all the cards face down on the table and swishing them around for what looks like 15 seconds.
Is there any reason that they do it this way? It seems like a particularly crappy type of shuffle to me. Firstly, it doesn’t seem to truly randomize the cards in any meaningful way and, secondly, it seems vulnerable to card counting by noting roughly which cards are going where.
Is this standard in professional poker tournaments? If so, why?
It’s used in poker games played for serious money.
(Although in TV games, the dealer now often opens a compartment in the tabletop, puts a pack in it and gets a newly shuffled pack from there.)
Riffle shuffles can be fixed by skilled card manipulators.
Presumably it does randomise the cards or they wouldn’t use it.
Card counting is used in blackjack to keep track of high cards already played to change the amounts you bet later. it has nothing to do with watching a card.
Anyway given the cards are all face-down, are being slid over and under each other and are then gathered together - how would you keep track of one card?
It’s called a “wash,” and it does, in fact, do a very efficient job of randomizing the deck (relative to the amount of time required). However, it’s never the only method used to shuffle by a professional poker dealer.
In the video linked in the OP, you can see the standard (nearly universal) method of shuffling the cards starting at the 11:10 mark. At the end of a given hand, there are generally cards lying on the table in several locations. They have to be raked in by the dealer in order to be collected, so it makes sense to take a few extra seconds when doing so to mix them up before gathering them into a proper stack. The dealer will then do three riffle shuffles and one “box,” in which the dealer basically cuts the deck *roughly *four times by successively removing sections of deck from the top and stacking them up one on top of another on the felt – either he’ll do riffle-riffle-box-riffle, or riffle-box-riffle-riffle; either is fine, but those are the only acceptable sequences.
Orthodoxy holds that, using no other methods, it takes seven (reasonably competent) riffles to “completely” randomize a deck. Wash & Riffle is just a faster alternative to riffling seven times.
I kind of learned this from my MTG days but shuffling doesn’t necessarily randomize the deck. You need to shuffle at least seven time in order to get some decent randomization. Anyway here’s a little tidbitthat a website wrote about the subject.
I don’t really get either of your objections. It sure looks like a good way of randomizing the cards to me - the mix looks pretty chaotic to me, which seems like it would result in a pretty random stack of cards. And if the cards are face down, how is one supposed to keep track of which cards are going where?
That’s if the dealer only washes the cards. Not performs a mixture of riffling and washing. As VarlosZ said in his first two sentences, washing is never used alone.
But the cards don’t consistently overlap like they would if they were just stacked one on top of another. You occasionally see a lazy wash, which does very little good for the reason described above, but a competent wash does actually help: it basically moves a random collection of cards from the top portion of the pile off to the side, then shoves them back into the pile at random spots along the middle and/or bottom, and it does this, say, about a dozen times. The bottom card can, in fact, wind up on top – it’s less likely to do so than other cards, but that’s why you’re not done shuffling.
Yeah, I’ve seen this done in Vegas almost every time I play cards. When I play with my friends, I do this to look cool. I want some sleeve garters too.
Swishing was always our family method and it works very well when done correctly. We did it that way because we could hardly shuffle and the standard shuffle left the same cards next to each other for us bad shufflers.
By “this,” I meant the swishing around on the table as opposed to a regular shuffle. But now that we’re on the topic, I should start bending my Aces… but only because I like damaged cards!