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Anecdotally, I find that certain card games are more enjoyable with the imperfections of human shuffling: when clumps naturally arise after playing, packing, an

Anecdotally, I find that certain card games are more enjoyable with the imperfections of human shuffling: when clumps naturally arise after playing, packing, and unpacking the game several times. An element of organic personality arises when you see a sequence of cards from a previous game. That human element is lost when a computer perfectly shuffles a deck into a never-before-seen orientation.

brookst 4mo ago
Games that sort the cards are the worst / most interesting for this. Gin rummy, etc, where the end result of a game is sorted groups of same-numbers and runs. You can really tell when then shuffling has just transposed a few cards.
- recursivecaveat 4mo ago
  Magic the gathering has this problem. You have 2 types of cards, and drawing an imbalanced mixture is pretty detrimental. During play you tend to sort them into 2 piles though. Consequently it's a not uncommon sight to see people manually interweaving their cards after a match, then shuffling. Logically, this is either pointless or cheating depending on the quality of that shuffle, but people do it anyways haha.
  - th0raway 4mo ago
    There's quite the history of straight out cheating in high level MtG, and yes, insufficient randomization is one of the most typical ways around it. If all you do is cut their deck, and do zero shuffles, you will find a perfect interweaving of lands and spells either way. Also see Magic players being fond of pile shuffles, which, of course, do very little randomization, and guarantee a good mana weave. Without a few shuffles of your own, most Magic decks ever presented are not sufficiently randomized, and it's even worse in Commander, where we are talking 100 card decks.
  - AndyNemmity 4mo ago
    The interesting thing is, the cheating in mtg has always been so, ridiculously bad. If anyone actually cared, and really learned the moves, it would be imperceptible, even on camera, but instead regularly players get caught doing the dumbest of obvious things, even while on camera.
- PaulHoule 4mo ago
  I am in a tarot group where we have a lot of decks that people share. Many tarot users believe that a deck develops a personality specific to the user and because of that I got my own deck which I take to the group. There's the general belief that all magical tools develop significance for the user over time, something that my wife who is a "secular green witch" who doesn't believe in psi at all would tell you all about. Scientifically though, if somebody isn't a good shuffler their deck is not going to be well shuffled and they'll get readings that deviate from what you'd get from a well shuffled deck. It's harder to shuffle a tarot deck well because it has more cards and these are frequently larger. (Personally my riffle shuffle is awful and probably not much better than an overhand) A new deck usually has the major arcana together and in order and other cards might be sorted by suit and then number. We do a 5 card spread and if your have a new and poorly shuffled deck of course you are going to have more spreads where you get both the Emperor and the Empress or the 4 of Swords and the 7 of Swords.
  - AndyNemmity 4mo ago
    One of the things is, I do magic, and used to do tarot. I found the tarot readings were infinitely better to the person getting the reading when I just forced the results. So I did. I still did all the things you're indicating about talking about specific personality, etc, as the patter to the concept.
    - PaulHoule 4mo ago
      Yeah, I see a lot of people doing tarot readings for money but I don't see myself doing that. I got into the tarot group because it's not so easy to find a therianthrope's guild! From a scientific perspective there is a lot to say for randomness. Like the theory that the I Ching was a version of game theory from bronze age China. I recently created A System of Blessings with 13 selected characters from the I Ching because I wanted to give people something nice but didn't want to give everybody the same thing.
      - AndyNemmity 4mo ago
        I never did it for money. I did it for free. My joy was in their joy. My job was to heighten their experience, and to essentially act as a mini therapist enabling them to feel confident in their own decisions. But I feel you. I did things entirely differently to everyone else. Which is why I thought it was an interesting story.
bombcar 4mo ago
There's even a form of bridge related to this IIRC, if a hand is passed out (nobody has opening to start the bidding), you stack the hands on top of each other and don't shuffle - because players organize their cards by suits, it always results in fun.
- pmyteh 4mo ago
  Yes - it's called goulashing. The cards are stacked and dealt out in groups of three and four to produce wild distributions. The most interesting feature of it for me is that the carefully-developed bridge bidding systems don't work properly as they're implicitly based on a normal random distribution of cards. With a goulash it's likely that both sides have hands with 7+ cards in one suit, and the game is to pre-emptively bid high in "your" suit before they can do so in theirs. So you would ideally like different signaling arrangements that indicate suit length rather than quality.

brookst 4mo ago

Games that sort the cards are the worst / most interesting for this. Gin rummy, etc, where the end result of a game is sorted groups of same-numbers and runs. You can really tell when then shuffling has just transposed a few cards.

recursivecaveat 4mo ago
Magic the gathering has this problem. You have 2 types of cards, and drawing an imbalanced mixture is pretty detrimental. During play you tend to sort them into 2 piles though. Consequently it's a not uncommon sight to see people manually interweaving their cards after a match, then shuffling. Logically, this is either pointless or cheating depending on the quality of that shuffle, but people do it anyways haha.
- th0raway 4mo ago
  There's quite the history of straight out cheating in high level MtG, and yes, insufficient randomization is one of the most typical ways around it. If all you do is cut their deck, and do zero shuffles, you will find a perfect interweaving of lands and spells either way. Also see Magic players being fond of pile shuffles, which, of course, do very little randomization, and guarantee a good mana weave. Without a few shuffles of your own, most Magic decks ever presented are not sufficiently randomized, and it's even worse in Commander, where we are talking 100 card decks.
- AndyNemmity 4mo ago
  The interesting thing is, the cheating in mtg has always been so, ridiculously bad. If anyone actually cared, and really learned the moves, it would be imperceptible, even on camera, but instead regularly players get caught doing the dumbest of obvious things, even while on camera.
PaulHoule 4mo ago
I am in a tarot group where we have a lot of decks that people share. Many tarot users believe that a deck develops a personality specific to the user and because of that I got my own deck which I take to the group. There's the general belief that all magical tools develop significance for the user over time, something that my wife who is a "secular green witch" who doesn't believe in psi at all would tell you all about. Scientifically though, if somebody isn't a good shuffler their deck is not going to be well shuffled and they'll get readings that deviate from what you'd get from a well shuffled deck. It's harder to shuffle a tarot deck well because it has more cards and these are frequently larger. (Personally my riffle shuffle is awful and probably not much better than an overhand) A new deck usually has the major arcana together and in order and other cards might be sorted by suit and then number. We do a 5 card spread and if your have a new and poorly shuffled deck of course you are going to have more spreads where you get both the Emperor and the Empress or the 4 of Swords and the 7 of Swords.
- AndyNemmity 4mo ago
  One of the things is, I do magic, and used to do tarot. I found the tarot readings were infinitely better to the person getting the reading when I just forced the results. So I did. I still did all the things you're indicating about talking about specific personality, etc, as the patter to the concept.
  - PaulHoule 4mo ago
    Yeah, I see a lot of people doing tarot readings for money but I don't see myself doing that. I got into the tarot group because it's not so easy to find a therianthrope's guild! From a scientific perspective there is a lot to say for randomness. Like the theory that the I Ching was a version of game theory from bronze age China. I recently created A System of Blessings with 13 selected characters from the I Ching because I wanted to give people something nice but didn't want to give everybody the same thing.
    - AndyNemmity 4mo ago
      I never did it for money. I did it for free. My joy was in their joy. My job was to heighten their experience, and to essentially act as a mini therapist enabling them to feel confident in their own decisions. But I feel you. I did things entirely differently to everyone else. Which is why I thought it was an interesting story.

bombcar 4mo ago

There's even a form of bridge related to this IIRC, if a hand is passed out (nobody has opening to start the bidding), you stack the hands on top of each other and don't shuffle - because players organize their cards by suits, it always results in fun.

pmyteh 4mo ago
Yes - it's called goulashing. The cards are stacked and dealt out in groups of three and four to produce wild distributions. The most interesting feature of it for me is that the carefully-developed bridge bidding systems don't work properly as they're implicitly based on a normal random distribution of cards. With a goulash it's likely that both sides have hands with 7+ cards in one suit, and the game is to pre-emptively bid high in "your" suit before they can do so in theirs. So you would ideally like different signaling arrangements that indicate suit length rather than quality.