ShuffleMasters

[Siegmund]

In bridge, cards are dealt out into 4 hands of 13 cards each. In social games, the cards played to each trick (normally all of the same suit) get collected into a stack by the person who wins the trick. If the deck is inadequately shuffled and these cards remain in a clump, the effect is to deal one of those cards to each of the four players on the next hand. This causes more evenly divided suits, and fewer long suits and fewer voids, than would be expected by chance alone.

Mediocre tournament bridge players will attribute their failure to win tournaments to absolutely anything except their own failure to handle their cards well, and one of the common accusations is that the computer-generated deals used in tournaments are rigged. (The computer deals are in fact fair.)

However, a) it's a very minor effect unless you shuffle really, really, really badly, b) it only afflicts games where order is imposed on the cards (most bridge players sort their 13 cards by suit and rank, most poker players get a lot fewer than 13 cards and don't sort them), and c) even in bridge, it afflicts social games with the cards thrown into the middle vastly more than it does duplicate bridge. In fact, I will add d): even in bridge, where this little statistical difference between hand and computer dealing exists, its impact is tiny compared to the various psychological reasons people whine about computer-dealt hands.

In other words, yes, it's a real, though trivia effect in some games; but no, it has absolutely nothing to do with the deficiencies of bad automatic shufflers in poker (which may leave exploitable information in the deck, but do NOT cause systematically more interesting or less interesting hands and flops.)

[Ohgod]

Thanks for that - thnking about it, I should have realised that the effect only occurs in bridge due to the stacking of tricks, so wouldn't affect poker anyway.