Gambling Tip of the Month

Prosperity Partners

Casinos differ on shuffling procedures used to prepare a deck or decks for continued play. They may include "riffling" or "stripping" the cards as well as "washing," "plugging," "boxing," and other idiosyncratic techniques. The ultimate goal, when a dealer shuffles up, is to achieve some level of randomization in the order of the cards.

Riffling the cards is the most commonly used shuffling technique used on all casino card games. To accomplish a riffle, the deck is divided roughly in half, then the dealer will pull the card corners up with the thumbs and let the two halves "riffle" together, interleaving the two halves into a solid deck. Dealers usually riffle the cards between three and five times before dealing the next round.

Stripping is a shuffling technique that reverses the sequential order of groups of cards in the deck. Dealers don't strip cards one at a time, but instead they rapidly pull small clumps of cards off the top of the deck, actually altering the order of cards in the deck. The number of cards in the clumps determines how fine or coarse the stripping process is.

Prosperity Partners, Inc.
www.prosperitypartners.com
800-868-6230
JasonR@ppicash.com