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The math of shuffling cards almost brought down an online poker empire

(www.scientificamerican.com)
97 points indigodaddy | 2 comments | 05 Sep 25 22:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.605s | source
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rekttrader ◴[07 Sep 25 05:14 UTC] No.45155593[source]▶
When I did it back in the day for a poker site we also had the constraint of never storing the positions of shuffled cards for security reasons. We always sorted the deck and when it came to dealing I developed a shuffle server that got noise from a taped up webcams cmos sensor, when a player needed a card it polled the server which was just outputting random positions from 0 to 51 continuously, if the card position was already dealt, it re requested a new one, entropy was gotten from player decision time and network speed. It was a fun thing to build.
replies(1): >>45155726 #
1. monero-xmr ◴[07 Sep 25 05:48 UTC] No.45155726[source]▶
Online poker died because having 1 other person at the table sharing cards surreptitiously drastically increases the odds in your favor, which ruins cash games. Let alone AI which has mostly solved the game if you have a bot making your decisions.

Poker must be played in person, otherwise it’s a dead game

replies(1): >>45155833 #
2. bzhang255 ◴[07 Sep 25 06:16 UTC] No.45155833[source]▶
None of this is wrong, but anecdotally, I will say that there are still human beings playing poker online, and a better human being can still win in the long run. (Though, live poker is much more fun)