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Old story, but maybe worth repeating

Posted By: Chuck Bower
Date: Tuesday, 20 October 2009, at 2:38 p.m.

In Response To: An Open Letter to SHG Players (W Womack)

I played competitive (US ACBL sanctioned) duplicate bridge from 1974 to 1979. There were occasional events which were played with common cards throughout the US. For reference, >99.9% of bridge hands played in ACBL events back then were human dealt. But for these special nationally coordinated events they used computer generated cards.

Many people insisted that the computer dealt hands were unnatural, with more wild distributions (like one player holding nine of the 13 cards in a suit).

I thought they had a point but were missing the conclusion. My theory was that indeed the distributions were different BECAUSE the computer dealt hands were in fact random.

About 8 years ago I saw a lecture by Persei Diaconis, an academic statistician who can relate to the public. One of the many (and far from the most valuable, IMO) things he said was that they did a study of randomization of a standard US 52 card playing deck and that in general it took a minimum of seven riffled shuffles to randomize the cards.

In any of your cardgames (bridge, poker, hearts,...) how often do you see the dealer/shuffler do seven or more riffled shuffles?

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