I British guy I know remarked that Americans seem to all know how to shuffle cards.
Doesn’t everybody?
Although I’ve been to a few casinos where the dealers shuffled the cards by spreading them out and swirling them around the table. I can’t imagine they don’t know how to shuffle, so I guessed that there’s no way they could pull any fast ones, as someone might suspect with a normal shuffle.
It’s a wash shuffle and common before either riffle shuffling or feeding into the auto shuffler. How much is security and how much is tradition and how much is actual randomization I have no idea.
^TIL.
I never saw a wash shuffle until recently. (‘Recently’ being relative, as it’s been many years since I’ve gambled and only visit casinos (for dinner) occasionally.) All my life I’ve seen everyone do the riffle shuffle… except when I was a little kid before I knew how to riffle shuffle. Googling, I found a page that said the first recorded use of the riffle shuffle was in Whole Art and Mystery of Modern Gaming , author unknown (1726). So ‘tradition’ sounds strange to me. (To me.)
Nope. My American husband cannot shuffle cards, play cards, play catch, nor does he have any interest in football, basketball, baseball, hockey or soccer.
?Even within the US. A friend of mine was raised in Chicago and his father was sent by his work down to Dallas for a couple days. He called the office and said, “I’m done. Anything else you want while I’m down here?”
“Yeah, swing by El Paso on your way back to Chicago.”
“‘Swing by El Paso?’ It’s a 16-hour drive!”*
They flew somebody else instead.
*This was before interstates.
Because many US states are larger than some countries. Ukraine is about the size of Texas. If Russia cannot take an area the size of Texas, they are not a world power.
I dunno. Texans are feisty, and so, as it turned out, are Ukrainians.
I get the feeling that when Americans decide to say they are “American”, or “from Chicago”, or “actually from a place an hour away from Chicago” - they are usually not considering the delicate balance of world military power.
An acquaintance of mine once asked his secretary to make travel arrangements for him for a conference he was attending in El Paso. A while later the secretary sent him an itinerary, which included a flight to Houston. He assumed there must be a connecting flight to El Paso from Houston, but didn’t see it on the itinerary, so he asked he secretary about it.
“Oh, flights to Houston were a lot cheaper. I figured you could just rent a car and drive to El Paso from there.”
That’s basically an all day drive. She changed his flights to El Paso.