# Vegas Computer Card Games--How Is The Shuffle Done? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 17, 2009, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vegas-computer-card-games-how-is-the-shuffle-done/517934 "2009-11-17T17:58:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Gus\_Gusterson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/85f322/32.png) [@Gus\_Gusterson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gus_Gusterson)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2009, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vegas-computer-card-games-how-is-the-shuffle-done/517934/21 "2009-11-19T15:52:23Z")
> [@muttrox](#): > > Why not have the player play actual face to face no limit poker? > > He plays a hand down to the river and forces the other player(s) to show their cards. Then he goes back and either folds or goes all-in. You could make a fortune very quickly. Every time you rewind and change what you do, you will end up changing what the other players do, too. Players that stayed in when the stakes were just the blinds may fold when the stakes are raised significantly. You won’t make a fortune quickly by just gathering up the blinds every few hands (remember, you won’t always have the winning hand). Go all-in a lot early in the game and you’re going to radically change how the other players react to you. You’ll still have to be a good player to use the extra edge to its maximum advantage. ---
**Author:** ![muttrox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a8b319/32.png) [@muttrox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muttrox)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2009, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vegas-computer-card-games-how-is-the-shuffle-done/517934/22 "2009-11-19T16:02:33Z")
Seriously? Any half-decent poker player who knows the other players cards should make a fortune. ---
**Author:** ![Gus\_Gusterson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/85f322/32.png) [@Gus\_Gusterson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gus_Gusterson)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2009, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vegas-computer-card-games-how-is-the-shuffle-done/517934/23 "2009-11-19T16:17:58Z")
> [@muttrox](#): > > Seriously? Any half-decent poker player who knows the other players cards should make a fortune. Over the long haul, that’s true. And re-reading the OP, I see that he just wants to “make a few thousand dollars a week”, so your approach would certainly be able to accomplish that and then some. I was reacting to the “you could make a fortune very quickly” claim (of course, “quickly” is not very well defined). You would need to be a good player to make a fortune in a day with your method, assuming that you start with a modest bankroll. If you make a full-time job of it, as the OP seems to be getting at, you could certainly make a fortune over time. ---
**Author:** ![muttrox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a8b319/32.png) [@muttrox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muttrox)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2009, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vegas-computer-card-games-how-is-the-shuffle-done/517934/24 "2009-11-19T16:29:30Z")
Maybe we’re just splitting hairs about how fast your bankroll has to grow to get “a fortune”. I would guess that I could double-up my stack every couple hours or so. (That’s hours of “real time”, it seems like it would take an awful lot of playing out and rewinding to get those two hour of “real time”) Really, you can wait for a hand where you have the best cards at the end, and go all-in on that hand. You can also try out huge bluffs and see if they work. To your point, I guess you’d have to lose some hands here and there or else players would never call your raises. Or maybe you could just change tables and casinos a lot. Any way you slice it, you should do just fine for yourself. Even a modest bankroll ought to grow very quickly. ---
**Author:** ![AmbushBug](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ambushbug/32/4600_2.png) [@AmbushBug](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AmbushBug)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2009, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vegas-computer-card-games-how-is-the-shuffle-done/517934/25 "2009-11-23T05:13:53Z")
> [@Gus\_Gusterson](#): > > I work for a software company that provides some of the software used in video gambling machines. All of the video poker machines based on our software generate a random 52-card deck and deal five cards to the player. When the player discards some of them, the remaining cards are reshuffled before being dealt. This is done because random number generators aren’t actually very random. With a bit of analysis you can reverse engineer the generator and predict the next number in the sequence. To counter this, we reseed the RNG every time the cards are dealt. This is correct for “currently approvable in Nevada” video poker machines, particularly the part about reshuffling before the draw. Per an unwritten Nevada “lab rule”, the cards that come up to replace a player’s discards ought not already be selected and static in memory. Since the shuffle of the remaining 47 cards will be based on RNG seeds which are dependent on in which split-second the deal/draw button is hit - you wouldn’t get the same cards (on a “rewind”, in your story) if you’d held differently unless you’re millisecond-good with the timing of hitting the button. I don’t think this should necessarily discourage you from putting it in your story, anyway, though. Such things only really bother the hell out of the vast minority of people who know better. And Turble also may be correct, for older machines - as old behaviors are almost always ‘grandfathered’ in. A long-ago episode of Columbo took great license involving cremated remains when the episode hinged on the presence of a large distinctively-shaped piece of shrapnel being provided by a crematory along with a deceased veteran’s ashes, neglecting the fact that a crematory always uniformly grinds such to uniform size and would discard such a fragment. I work for a slot machine manufacturer; I have written video poker games which have been approved for sale in Nevada within the past 7 years. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vegas-computer-card-games-how-is-the-shuffle-done/517934.md?page=1)