Crazy Vegas Poker provides our clients with the added comfort of an independent third party review of our shuffling. To guarantee the fairest in play, a shuffling algorithm is applied to ensure that a truly random deck is used. Our sort shuffle is based on using a random number generator that generates 2^32 different values pulled from a 4096 bit entropy pool. This is different than the Knuth shuffle used by some other systems, and it has some advantages. Here is an example of how the shuffling algorithm works. We assign a random value to each card, as follows:
Then we sort the cards by their unique index value. This results in an ordering like this:
Our method of shuffling eliminates the problem that a single pass Knuth shuffle has involving the modulo bias. It's possible to mitigate the effects of this by using a multi-pass Knuth shuffle, but there's no reason to do that when you can use a superior algorithm. Some interesting numbers: A deck of cards can have 52! (Roughly 8x10^67) permutations.
This number can be determined simply fairly easily. The first
card dealt can be any one of 52 cards. The second card can be
one of any of the remaining 51 cards. At this point there are
51x52 different permutations. The third card can be any of the
remaining 50, so to find the number of possible shuffled decks
you calculate 52x51x50x49 ... 3x2x1 which results in approximately
8x10^67 different combinations.
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