**** all cheaters
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Posted on Dec. 21, 2014, 8:26 p.m. by h20
Guys , I want to teach players how to **** a cheaters day up . Always shuffle tour opponents deck extensively before cutting . This ends double nickel and stacking . Always be careful about your cards . Never cheat. Amen.
Gidgetimer says... #3
Starting from a separated deck with all lands on top and spells on bottom, two five-pile pile shuffles results in an almost perfect mana weave.
Explained here
December 21, 2014 9:10 p.m.
Ohhh. That's crafty. This must be while everyone at my shop does pile shuffles. Dirty...
December 21, 2014 9:16 p.m.
Gidgetimer says... #5
I kinda doubt most people are trying to cheat with pile shuffles, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. That being said I don't feel comfortable playing against someone who hasn't done 7+ good riffles or mashes. Even then you have to be careful because it is relatively easy to maintain the top card during these shuffles.
The two shuffles that makes me extra cautious is if they do one and only one overhand or hindu shuffle at some point. This is because both of these shuffles bring the bottom card to the top and are re-ordering cards instead of randomizing them.
December 21, 2014 9:29 p.m.
NobodyPicksBulbasaur says... #8
Pile shuffles aren't a bad thing. They're good for preliminarily breaking up the clumps of 8-10 lands you're likely to have when picking up your cards after a game. This will lower the probability of those 8+ lands remaining together throughout your shuffles.
Just remember that pile shuffles by themselves don't sufficiently randomize your deck. You'll have to do several riffle shuffles or mash shuffles to get your deck to a suitably random state.
December 21, 2014 9:44 p.m.
Ohthenoises says... #9
1 pile followed by 5 riffle/mash is usually sufficient for me.
The actual issue with cheaters now isn't in the stacking of your own deck but, rather, stacking your opponent's deck when cutting. In pro REL events a simple cut isn't good enough, you must shuffle your opponent's deck. During that time there can be slight of hand to add 5-6 lands to the topdeck of the other player causing them to mulligan.
(This coming from someone who is capable, but never willing, to perform this Sleight of Hand I can tell you that it's incredibly easy to do.)
December 21, 2014 9:56 p.m.
Ohthenoises says... #10
P.S. The better you are at doing these stacking tricks the easier it is to see it. When Trevor Humphries got caught I saw it immediately from both angles.
Moral of the P.S.? Learn how to spot people messing with your stuff.
December 21, 2014 9:58 p.m.
Servo_Token says... #11
"This will lower the probability of those 8+ lands remaining together throughout your shuffles."
This could be considered purposefully neglecting to randomize your deck. You should probably be careful with that explanation. Basically, just mash shuffle your cards, and cut them yourself before presenting to your opponent. If they take 5 years to mash shuffle your deck, call them out on it. If they just cut your deck again, continue your game. Just don't bother with pile shuffling to get around suspicions of potentially cheating.
December 21, 2014 9:58 p.m.
Samuel2528 says... #12
Yes, I believe in the official Magic the Gathering Rule book it states something to the affect of 'a pile shuffle does not suffice, and that you cannot have your last shuffle be a pile shuffle' basically, pile-shuffle, then mash shuffle 5-10 times and add in your own favorite shuffles.
December 21, 2014 10:29 p.m.
NobodyPicksBulbasaur says... #13
To clarify, a single riffle shuffle won't magically break up a large land pocket. It may spread it out a bit around the edges, but you'll still have a (potentially smaller) land pocket. Riffle shuffle a couple more times and you'll continue to shrink that pocket, but if the pocket was large to begin with, it may still persist. While the deck is well shuffled and is "random", you'll still have some sort of land pocket somewhere in the deck, which is undesirable.
Riffle shuffling doesn't truly randomize a deck in the mathematical sense of the word until after some arbitrarily large number of riffles. Instead of shuffling some arbitrary number of times, we simply call it good enough once the deck is fairly well mixed and the position of any given card can't be distinguished by either player. This can be achieved through approximately 7 riffles.
My point was that 7 riffle shuffles may not always break up excessively large land pockets. Pile shuffling helps remove the land pockets so that "good enough" after 7 or so riffles yields a result that is more akin to a truly random arrangement of cards. You might still end up with land clumps, but that's how randomness works.
December 21, 2014 10:35 p.m.
NobodyPicksBulbasaur says... #14
It's the same reason you should weave your deck immediately after you make it. If, before you start shuffling, your deck looks like this:
Top
20 creatures
20 spells
20 lands
Bottom
then it's going to be very difficult to randomize. I'm sure most of you have shuffled a freshly made deck what you thought was an appropriate number of times, only to have the ugliest, clumpiest opening hands you've ever seen.
After weaving the fresh deck you still need to shuffle, and well, but the closer your deck starts to random before you shuffle, the easier it is to get it to a random state.
December 21, 2014 10:42 p.m.
NobodyPicksBulbasaur I think this is merely confirmation bias as someone that's aware of needing to randomize properly is more likely to shuffle more thoroughly. After proper shuffling, a deck of 20 creatures, 20 spells and 20 lands that started in order is no more or less random or evenly distributed than if you had pile shuffled it to be creature, spell and land repeated 20 times before starting to shuffle.
I can't claim that the programming is 100%, but you can play around with a model of pile and riffling shuffling here - http://chrisdanek.com/pileshuffle.html. Piling twice to get everything smoothed out and then rifling seven times doesn't have a positive influence on the deck's final state than simply riffle shuffling it seven times.
December 21, 2014 11:40 p.m.
kungfuturtle says... #16
watch for panda shuffling which is simply gripping a card as you are shuffling and you can place them wherever you want in the deck before cutting.
December 22, 2014 2:42 a.m.
My advice watch for overhand shuffles where your opponent looks down at your deck. If the top of your deck is in their palm chances are they are peaking at the bottom card of your deck and cheating in atleast one way.
All the damn videos the bottom card is visible to the overhead camera doesn't that scream cheater right there. If the camera can see so can the players.
December 22, 2014 3:45 a.m.
Gidgetimer says... #18
capriom85: This is a hindu shuffle.
It is basically holding the deck face down in one hand and using the other to strip packets of ~4 cards off of the top allowing them to fall into the hand doing the stripping. When done quickly you can make the last "packet" 1 card effectively moving the bottom card to the top. It has the same effect as an overhand shuffle but arouses less suspicion from most since the cards are not visible during the shuffle itself.
December 22, 2014 7:11 a.m.
NobodyPicksBulbasaur says... #19
There may be some amount of confirmation bias. I won't try to argue against it. I think the main issue with persistent clumps is human error, though. Humans can't always perform perfect riffle shuffles, and imperfect shuffles can have imperfect results with randomization.
December 22, 2014 7:47 p.m.
Actually it's somewhat the opposite, you're looking for something between a perfect shuffle and simply moving chunks of cards around. An imperfect riffle is the desired effect. A perfect riffle would in fact defeat the purpose of shuffling as the cards would only make the same predicted moves - Card 1 ends at Card 1, Card 30 ends at Card 2, Card 2 ends at Card 3, and so on. Randomization depends upon, in part, the human error to not cause the cards to fall perfectly one to one from both stacks.
capriom85 says... #2
What is double nickel?
December 21, 2014 8:56 p.m.