Comments on: How to Cheat

By: Part 4/5 – The Secret Sauce :: Being Awesome — Flores Rewards

Part 4/5 – The Secret Sauce :: Being Awesome — Flores Rewards — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 04:55:02 +0000

[...] a deck list. If it is true, it will be true for a long time. A great example would be my blog post How to Cheat on Five With Flores. I wrote that over a year ago and it is still attracting links in from other [...]

By: Mike Flores: How to cheat « LIMITED MTGO

Mike Flores: How to cheat « LIMITED MTGO — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:15:18 +0000

[...] Mike Flores on Shuffling [...]

By: Savage, Lands — Flores Rewards

Savage, Lands — Flores Rewards — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:20:39 +0000

[...] that will perfectly distribute your deck. I wrote about it in the influential How to Cheat over on the other blog… But I thought it might be practical to show you how someone might go [...]

By: Shuffle Hard, Shuffle Real Hard « Games We Play

Shuffle Hard, Shuffle Real Hard « Games We Play — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 02:26:39 +0000

[...] to Mike Flores and his article over at Five with Flores, I know the answer to that question. I do, in fact, suck at [...]

By: rkm08160

rkm08160 — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 02:17:43 +0000

The only thing I can think is that Evan (or whoever tried to explain it to him) misunderstood “Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to it’s Lair” by Bayer and Diaconis.

By: troelslmunk

troelslmunk — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 10:51:40 +0000

I just have to get this straight:
The Double Nickel gets your mana distributed evenly over the deck, but is that cheating?
No, the deck isn’t randomized by the Double Nickel, but if you shuffle sufficiently before and/or afterwards, is there any point to doing a Double Nickel? And if so, is it cheating?
In other words, should I call the judge if my opponent makes a Double Nickel or only if that is all he does to “randomize” the deck?

By: gro0003

gro0003 — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:27:52 +0000

@those people arguing against the whole ‘a randomized deck looks stacked’ thing:
I think Mike may have been simplifying his explanation a little bit.

After all, nothing is completely random.

By: wills

wills — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:45:43 +0000

I just want to reiterate what whatisfgh said. A randomized deck is not a stacked deck. Sometimes it will have clumps. There is even the possibility that every single spell end up on the bottom of the deck with every single land on top of the spells. The advice of this article not to use pile shuffles and to watch your opponent for stacking is sound. I will add though that I usually do some overhand shuffles and a couple “random” pile shuffles where I don’t just distribute the cards one by one in a circle. These methods less efficient than riffling, but I am paranoid that my riffling my preferentially follow a certain pattern and so do these other techniques to break it up.

By: stipes

stipes — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:50:32 +0000

@Jeranimus Rex: As far as I know, you are allowed to cut your deck after getting it back from your opponent, but only if they actually shuffled it. If I stop being lazy some time later today, I’ll try to dig up the relevant tournament policy/floor rules section.

By: whatisfgh

whatisfgh — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:19:34 +0000

Just a few things.

I notice that most of your examples of why pile shuffling is bad revolve around starting with a known deck, but how about if you just scoop up your cards riffle once or twice and then pile shuffle? this is in terms of you randomizing your deck (since you’re taking an “unknown” quantity and messing it around more? no idea on this one). Not in terms of catching a cheater who will be starting with a stacked deck.

second
“Because as we saw with the marbles, the more you randomize, the more mixed the cards become. If you randomize really, really, well… No land clumps. Spells are distributed. Et cetera.”

is not random, it’s an even distribution (though to be fair, most magic things mean some kind of pseudo randomness that is close enough) . While not impossible proper randomization can in fact produce large land clumps etc. taking your marble example only with an infinite number of them and equal probability. just because it’s 50/50 doesn’t mean that after some kind of equivalent sample that mirrors 6-7 riffles you won’t have huge clumps.

This is probably a huge problem for judges and probably why it is hard to catch cheaters (unless they are blatantly doing stacking/pile shuffling tricks… then umm… watch them or something…) as unless the judges are deck checking them regularly there is not a reasonable way to tell if the even distribution/clumps is a fluke.

“simply riffling enough will get you to the point that you are nearly stacked”
If riffling does in fact get you to the point where you are basically stacked I’d say it is stacking… but I suspect that it just gives you basically randomness and that will gives you “normal” draws with regular probability.

not harshing… big fan. It’s just the even distribution = randomness that bothers me