Funny FullTilt Business

[pothead]

Something similar happened to me on Bodog when I had internet lag.
I don't recall the precise sequence of events but basically when reconnecting I was sitting with a hand playing a flop and turn only to have the community cards change by the river.
Although I didn't get the same buggy impression from FTP software maybe they can have similar lag issues?

[Greg Miller]

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I can't speak for every site, but I do know that on some at least, the random generator shuffles the deck of cards and then has a determined order for the upcoming cards before they are actually dealt (just like in real poker).

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It would almost certainly be the case on all sites.

To program it you either set up a pack and shuffle it, which is quite straight forward, or you pick a card at random when one is needed and discard it if it's already been used in this hand. Possible, but it involves pointless extra effort.

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Actually, when using a software PRNG, there's no particular reason to generate an entire shuffled deck at the start of the hand. As long as you maintain a separate seed state for each hand in progress, you get the exact same results with less computation and memory usage by dealing one card at a time (although it's unlikely that shuffling would account for a large percentage of server load in any case). When using hardware generators, it typically would change the results, but it would be hard to construct a scenario where you'd detect the difference.

I doubt anybody would pick a random card and then discard it if it'd already been used in the hand. It's simpler to just keep a list of unused cards and pull one at random.

[qpw]

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Actually, when using a software PRNG, there's no particular reason to generate an entire shuffled deck at the start of the hand. As long as you maintain a separate seed state for each hand in progress, you get the exact same results with less computation and memory usage by dealing one card at a time (although it's unlikely that shuffling would account for a large percentage of server load in any case). When using hardware generators, it typically would change the results, but it would be hard to construct a scenario where you'd detect the difference.

I doubt anybody would pick a random card and then discard it if it'd already been used in the hand. It's simpler to just keep a list of unused cards and pull one at random.

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It might be slightly more efficient to make a linked list of cards and remove them as they are dealt, the greater complexity of getting a card being offset by the omission of the sort - I've never benchmarked it, but it is trivially easy to just generate the deck in once go.

I can't really see why anyone would care about separate seeds for each hand. What they care about is whether or not the cards are random, not that they relate to a specific sequence from a PRNG.

[Sandviper23]

I know the orginal poster, he is creditble.

Hey Benton, whats up its Adam. How have you been? where are you living now?

[AAquadsAA]

are we twins, you stole my avatar

[lvkajunkid]

Adam!! What's up brother? I am still in Austin. Hoping to move to either Biloxi, Mississippi or back to Vegas within the next year. How's Baseball? We need to catch up one day on Yahoo. Or just PM me. Later bro.

[spider]

These are some pretty ridiculous theories about software shuffling and randomness. It is pretty obvious that what happened is OP traveled forward and then backwards in time. It's not really that uncommon.