*le sigh*
I'll begin at the top I guess...
Isn't this what a cut card aims to prevent and I am sure there are instances where an independent dealer requests from players to cut a shuffled deck but I will have to research some references to prove.
I always thought that if requesting to cut a deck it is commonly allowed.
The cut card serves two major purposes: one is to prevent dealing from the bottom of the deck. The other, much more practical, one is that it stops the bottom card on the deck from accidentally being exposed as the dealer moves the hand holding the deck stub.
I'm not going to say that there are
no real casinos anywhere in the world that will let you cut the deck if you ask, because I obviously haven't been to all of them, but I'd be very surprised if you could find one. Generally speaking, in a casino the only cards you should be allowed to touch during a hand are the ones that are deal to you.
I'd be
more suspicious that a player was cheating if they wanted to cut the deck in a casino. And I'd probably up and leave straight away if the casino actually let them do it.
Hah! It seems my reasoning for the lucky aspect of cutting was spot on.
N'yeah... read the quote again. It says "some players also
consider the cut to be lucky". The fact that there are people stupid enough to
think that is neither here nor there. The cut exists for deck randomisation and as a measure of game security in self-dealt games.
Take for example a new ordered deck and split it in two parts. The one part will have 2 suites and the second will have 2 suites. Doing a riffle on these two parts and cutting the deck into two halves again, you should find a dispersion of 4 suites in each half. This is vastly different to producing a deck by randomly choosing one of 52 cards placed one top of each other. Would you agree?
No, I absolutely would not. If it's been shuffled, a deck that has a perfect distribution of all four suits (not suites - those are fancy hotel rooms) in each half of the deck is no more or less random than one that, after shuffling, has the cards in any other order.
In fact, if you did somehow come up with a shuffle procedure that perfectly evenly distributed the suits throughout the deck it would be LESS random than an ordinary shuffle that doesn't care what cards end up where. DUCY?
Besides, online poker took something which was natural and turned it very mechanical and I think there is room to bring more of the physical aspects into this virtual reality and I feel using shuffling techniques instead of a RNG will go a long way to facilitate this.
I'm not at all sure what you mean buy "shuffling techniques". A randomly ordered deck is a randomly ordered deck, regardless of whether it was shuffled by hand using physical cards, or ordered by an RNG in a computer.
Just for the lulz though: there
was a site (I dunno if it ever actually launched or was successful) that said it was going to use a physical deck of cards, shuffled by a machine, as the seed for its RNG. It was clearly marketed to the
"online poker is rigged / I'd be a winning player if the RNG didn't keep screwing me / online poker is so unnatural compared to live poker" market.
Here's the fun part: someone smarter than me on another forum did the math to prove that its results were far less random than an ordinary RNG shuffle, and the system was therefore inferior.
This thread may interest you BTW:
https://www.cardschat.com/forum/pok...gged-megathread-all-rigged-roads-lead-228298/
I know some casinos use continuous shuffling machines especially for blackjack but is this the case for poker? The thing is that it is not simply producing a randomly arranged deck, if that was the case it could be argued that you don't have to shuffle at all as the act of dealing already produces a mixture and players randomly fold so you can just use the discard pile and the unused cards as is again. But this is not acceptable in any live setting then why is it considered acceptable online?
In a brick and mortar casino? No, nobody would ever continuously shuffle in a
poker game. It'd result in a less secure game (cards could be flashed) and it'd slow things down needlessly.
And you couldn't simply reuse the deck without shuffling because observant players would know what order at least some of the cards would be in from the previous hand (their own cards, board cards, any other cards turned up at showdown). For example, if you folded 3s 7c the previous hand and you got 3s again the next hand, you could reasonably surmise that one of the players next to you received 7c.
As for why they'd use a continuous shuffle online... eh, my question is why not? It makes no practical difference to the outcome of the hand and it's theoretically more secure than having an ordered deck. If someone somehow managed to hack the site's software so they could see the preordered deck they'd know what was coming next - whereas that's not possible with a continuous shuffle.
If I remember correctly, the classic examples were
poker stars and Full Tilt - I believe Stars used to use a preordered deck, while Full Tilt used "continuous shuffling". I don't know if that's still the case post-Black Friday.
A serious question: do you think it's a problem that online poker doesn't use burn cards?
By allowing us to cut the deck online it will still the suspicions that the game is rigged IMO and facilitates something far more natural.
LOL - no, I promise you it won't. The rigtards would be just as loud as ever even if you did allow them to "cut" the deck.