The weird rule is that you are not allowed to cut the deck after it has been presented and shuffled by the opponent.
I agree, players should be allowed to do that.
No, players should not be allowed to cut to one of their four marked cards that can win them the game before Turn 3.
Which is why I suggested a fix to that here--a cut that forbids the player from touching their own deck.
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I don't play decks. I solve optimization problems.
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Does everyone else not realise the OP is blatant bull*****?
"I'm a master cheater and I'm here to warn you about cheating."
It's attention-seeking tripe, written by a teenager with an over-active imagination.
I am not a master cheater, nor do I claim to be. I'm not here to garner attention. I have a very small amount of posts here, as I primarily lurk. My reputation/attention I get means nothing to me. I simply want to bring attention to an issue in magic. The title is admittedly a very click-bait title.
As for cheating in casual matches, I don't do it to win. I did it to see how easy it would be, to see if this is a real issue, and it is.
Noob question. What's a table cut? A Google search just got me results about cutting gemstones lol.
A table cut is then you cut the deck on the table. You don't get to lift the deck up with your hands as it allows for a plethora of hidden movements and sleights.
The weird rule is that you are not allowed to cut the deck after it has been presented and shuffled by the opponent.
This would be a great addition to the current rules, and would solve many problems in one.
As many of you have expressed, a cut cannot combat mana-weaving, a possibility I clearly did not think of. That is why I posted this here to a forum full of people who play the game more than I do. This is meant to spur discussion on the issue. I don't know everything there is to know about Magic, and I don't claim to.
Also, I don't cheat in magic to win, I cheated to learn how easy it was, as well as to educate all of the players at my local store. Many of you may see it as a non-issue because you haven't experienced it and if you did, you likely wouldn't know. If I was cheating for profit, I would not have taken the time to anonymously post to arguably the largest MTG board on the internet.
Moving on.
This is a great example of a rather skilled card sleight that involved slipping the card to the top of the deck. Nothing fancy, just quick and fluid movements. This guy won the tournament and no one was the wiser. You may think I'm trying to sound like some cool teenage card superhero, but the reality is, there are loads of people out there like this guy, and they will cheat, and they will get away with it. This guy's only downfall was the cameras. Imagine what he does when there are none?
Remember something. That guy won. I can't even begin to explain how terrible that is.
Say what you will. Say I'm shooting for attention. Whatever. I simply want to bring to attention how easy it is to cheat. Believe it or not, not all people with the ability to cheat do it for profit. Myself falling in that category. I want to take my knowledge of card sleights, educate others on how easy they are to miss, and hopefully bring an awareness.
This discussion where you guys point out the issues of just cutting the deck are great. I'm more a poker player than I am a magic player. Issues like mana weaving never occurred to me. But like it was mentioned above, adding a cut to the end of your opponent shuffling would be a great way to allow for shuffling a mana weave as well as cutting away an opponent's stacking of the cards. That is why I'm posting here, so as a community we can work the issue out. If you have any other gripes with me or with what I said, fire away, but also try to stay on topic. This is something that matters to me.
This guy admits to cheating on a regular basis. I say ban him, his behavior is deplorable and ruins gaming. Discussing shuffling and competitive play is great, but in this context is just disappointing.
So we should ban me because I admit to an act of which I wish to remove from the game? So be it. Once again, I have no stock in this account. A banning means nothing. If I broke the rules, go for it.
Many of you are missing the point. Watch the video I linked. That is a video of a man cheating at Star City Games Worcester, and getting away with it, then winning the tournament. Doesn't that worry any of you? He isn't the only one that cheats.
Cheating is real. It happens. The card sleights people are capable of doing under a watchful eye are very real, and not just backyard magic tricks. Whether any of you want to believe it or not, it happens, and I don't doubt for a second that any accomplished card shark could cheat right under your nose, and even after reading this thread and being more aware, he/she would still get away with it.
OP comes off as mostly a white-hat hacker and I wouldn't like to see him banned from the forums.
There's a couple reasons I can think of that we don't have a final cut of a player's own deck after shuffling.
1. Time cost. It's pretty quick but the deck does have to change hands again. If cutting is poorly defined, and the player wants to "cut" their deck into seven piles and reassemble them in some order than that's going to be an issue.
2. "Tutoring". While posters have pointed out that getting one card for sure in your starting hand isn't always as good as having a perfect mana weave, sometimes it is. When Quest for the Holy Relic was a standard deck with no way to search for that enchantment, I'd be willing to accept a 5 card hand with no other guarantees if I got a guarantee that card would be in every starting hand I took. If a card is marked, or maybe a player even can try to track that card's location while their opponent shuffles their deck, having the opportunity to make a final cut lets the player put a key card like that on top of their own deck. While if the opponent shuffles the deck without looking at the faces, he is unable to put the worst card on top or best card on bottom.
In spite of these reasons maybe a final cut would be worthwhile.
Is it possible to do a randomized pile shuffle by incorporating dice rolls into the process? Like first roll a die to determine how many piles you're going to make, then after making the piles roll a die to determine which pile you pick up first? Just a hypothetical/thought experiment.
Is it possible to do a randomized pile shuffle by incorporating dice rolls into the process? Like first roll a die to determine how many piles you're going to make, then after making the piles roll a die to determine which pile you pick up first? Just a hypothetical/thought experiment.
Or we could avoid random uncessisary steps by actually shuffling and not using a non shuffling technique
You and your friends cheat at Poker for profit (supposedly), yet you feel the need to work to raise community awareness of the potential issue in Magic? Why?
It's a game you clearly and admittedly aren't even that familiar with (if you were you would have immediately recognized the enormous flaw in your suggestion that I pointed out regarding the issues associated with not shuffling). Why care about it when clearly you don't have an issue with cheating/cheaters in your preferred game?
Just doesn't add up. Sounds like a kid who saw Rounders, put that together with recent cheating issues in Magic, and is now stirring the pot.
It doesn't have to add up. I can't raise an issue without having a hidden agenda? Whatever. I'm clearly not finding any success here. I have no reason to lie about my story or anything I said here. It isn't like any of you here know me in real life. You have no idea who is sitting behind the keyboard typing this. I don't receive any of your praise or hate, this anonymous account does. So why would I lie? I don't get it.
In this thread: Op gets a bad draw, possibly bad mulligan, loses good rare prize pack, convinced that everyone around him is cheating.
Grow up.
Why are we all focused on me? Focus on the discussion at hand. Honestly, I don't see the point in reasoning with any of you here. So much hostility and distrust.
I don't see anything bad about my deck being shuffled by the opponent. Can just simply call a judge if I notice that he / she is shuffling my deck in a manner that looks like I'm being cheated. :3
I'm of two minds; My dad was a huge fan of sleight of hand, so I started learning sleight of hand (card tricks, balls, rings, coins, you name it) when I was 5 or 6. I worked for a summer doing magic shows for kids, and I never got caught out by any of the adults who claimed to "know" sleight of hand. But at the same time, most of these people who "know" sleight of hand can maybe do a French drop or a false cut/false shuffle. That's it. Like the video you linked with trevor Humphries, guy was a complete amateur. You can very clearly see in the first run at the video from the way his hands are positioned that he's holding the deck "awkwardly" to cover the thumb movement. The reality is, we've all held decks of sleeved cards, and we all know how someone comfortably holds a deck when side mashing, riffle shuffling, or pile shuffling. There's only one, MAYBE two convenient hand positions to grasp a deck in and shuffle. Anything else is already a dead giveaway that your opponent either A. doesn't know how to shuffle well or B. is up to something shady. Once you know that one of those two is the case, you're a lot more likely to be able to spot the cheat if you know what to look for. When people are stacking a card, it's almost always with a side shuffle that preserves the top of the deck--if they preserve the top of the deck the whole time, always call a judge and let the judge know. Don't accuse the person, just let the judge know, and let the judge do the educating. Same thing goes for stacking "good" cards to the bottom. It's much easier to see that someone is preserving the top or bottom of the deck than it is to catch them actually looking at the cards, or to actually catch some "manipulations". OTOH, some manipulations, like the Humphries thumb-swipe, or as I learned it "the pass under", are actually fairly easy to spot if you look at the shuffler from any angle other than the one they're covering with the passive hand.
The only sleights you can easily do without moving your hands from the basic "comfortable" positions are false cuts, false shuffles, cutting to a marked card, and preserving a sequence of cards in order in some portion of the deck. We're not usually worried about people preserving the order of cards in the middle, just top/bottom, and in any case preserving the order of a set of cards requires first stacking them, which is quite hard to do without moving your hands from a basic "comfortable" position. Any time you want to move a single card around with thumb, pinky, or a drop, you have to position the passive hand to block the viewer from seeing the sleight, and doing that requires obvious changes in hand position. The hardest part of sleight of hand cheats like this is distracting your opponent from the hand position change.
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Pretty much any means to make shuffling more "random" is just not practicle and people simply wont do it.
And no matter what, if someone wants to cheat, they WILL cheat, and theres nothing you can do to prevent it.
People cheat even on camera and they even get away with it, as nobody looks that closely and maybe the camera angle simply did not catch it.
No matter what, if someone really wants to cheat and is willing to take the risk of getting caught (which mainly is becoming a social outlaw, secondary is the lengthly DCI banning) , theres nothing you can do to preven it.
HOWEVER , its a good start to give judges a good understand how basic cheats work, that should be part of what judges are told, as part of the rules to have an idea of what to look for.
For the players, cheaters should be a minor concern. You simply get paranoid and its not fun anymore if all you do is think how your opponent is going to cheat you.
As a player, you should focus on the game, the rest is a job for judges and other tournament officials.
Statistics help to find some very high potential cheaters.
If someone shuffles a deck and the opponent repeatly gets 0 lands or equally "unlikely" hands (we are talking about multiple opponents, same tournament and such, which are NOT just random) ; judges should use this open data to look more closely, if theres nothing, they wont find anything, but if its a blatant cheater you will find them over longer time periods.
Like in every PreRelease you can bet someone will bring cards, someone will cheat and put cards in the Limited Sealed Pool they are not allowed to use ; but still, if that player is more or less bad, it wont win the tournament anyway and its important to keep a "casual" atmosphere in such events, which by itself avoids some people that just want the prices.
If it comes to shuffling, its important that each player shuffles a deck. If just 1 does, all the cheating potential is in that players hands. If both players shuffle, each is responsible and each puts effort into making a deck as random as it gets.
If someone cheats, you will find out if you track some statistics.
No matter what you cant avoid cheaters all together, but its totally viable to track them down.
But again, keep that to the judges and a handfull of spectators that watch exactly for that.
The normal player should really not bother with cheaters at all, it will just make the game less enjoyable for you.
The title of the thread is ridiculous. It's like saying I rob old ladies because it's easy to rob them. You cheat because you're a degenerate plain and simple.
Second, not buying your credibility story of how you cheat high stakes poker either, that sounds like the kind of fantasy they put in Hollywood films. The kind where you get your legs broken if you get caught. In poker tables you don't get to touch the deck either, so I'm not sure where your sleight of hand comes in.
Third, if you did cheat at poker tables as you claim, there should be no reason to cheat at Magic. Since poker is your money making venture, cheating at something that you do socially and should be enjoyable makes no sense. It'll be like if Lance Armstrong took PEDs on a mountain trail ride with friends.
First, I have met someone who can manipulate cards like you wouldn't believe. He used to be a pro tour player about 10 years ago but quit because of the large amount of cheating that goes on at higher level events. He is also a poker player and an amateur magician. He only does casual events and those he does infrequently. We have sat down and played Magic and he has shown me, in slow motion, the cheats he COULD do but does NOT. It's scary.
I am especially wary of the new extra layer you have to punch through to make it to the Pro Tour. Making it even harder to get there means more incentive to cheat. I have stopped going to competitive REL events because wasting a whole day for a chance to waste another day before getting to go to the Pro Tour isn't appealing to me, especially when we know cheats/bad rulings can and do win these things, making playing a waste of time.
Third, if you did cheat at poker tables as you claim, there should be no reason to cheat at Magic. Since poker is your money making venture, cheating at something that you do socially and should be enjoyable makes no sense.
If you think money/goods/prize is the main motivator for cheating in games/sports you have a lot of rethinking to do.
Third, if you did cheat at poker tables as you claim, there should be no reason to cheat at Magic. Since poker is your money making venture, cheating at something that you do socially and should be enjoyable makes no sense.
If you think money/goods/prize is the main motivator for cheating in games/sports you have a lot of rethinking to do.
I'm pretty sure people don't cheat without the intention to win. I don't think I have any rethinking to do.
The weird rule is that you are not allowed to cut the deck after it has been presented and shuffled by the opponent.
This, or ask for your opponent to cut it. Really, it should be standard procedure to cut the deck at the end of whatever shuffling is done, whether it is your shuffling or your opponent's shuffling.
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"Because we cannot prevent draws in paper Magic we allow IDs. If we could prevent draws we would not have IDs in paper Magic. " Scott Larabee.
Third, if you did cheat at poker tables as you claim, there should be no reason to cheat at Magic. Since poker is your money making venture, cheating at something that you do socially and should be enjoyable makes no sense.
If you think money/goods/prize is the main motivator for cheating in games/sports you have a lot of rethinking to do.
I'm pretty sure people don't cheat without the intention to win. I don't think I have any rethinking to do.
Are you one of those who don't see any point in playing competitive rel magic besides winning ?
If you purposely cheat in magic, that is pathetic. On another note cheating will always exist if humans are playing a game. Not much can be done about this, except maybe switch to online mtg, and that is horribly boring and I would rather wash dishes. I hope someone craps on the chest of blatant cheaters. Yea you are a badass if you can do sleight of hand, but when you use it to cheat that negates all of your skill and simply makes you a turd that has been in the freezer for too long.
3. I believe that seven real shuffles, riffles in this case, is supposed to be adequate for randomizing a Magic deck.
The Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model suggests 7.98 shuffles for a 40-card deck (Limited), 8.55 shuffles for a 52-card deck (playing cards), 8.86 shuffles for a 60-card deck (Constructed), and 9.94 shuffles for a 99-card deck (Commander). It is an overestimate of what's required, however (1) shuffling "too much" doesn't make a deck less random, and (2) the numbers assume what's called Good Riffle Shuffles (or a shuffle which is mathematically equivalent), which is uncommon for someone who isn't an experienced shuffler (anyone performing suboptimal shuffles would need extra iterations to fully randomize the deck).
It matters what you consider random. Suppose you put a specific card on the top of your deck and then perform seven "good riffle shuffles". In practice, the card cannot end up on the bottom of the deck (those riffle shuffles would not be "good" if the card got that deep). Even if it is possible to get to the bottom of the deck, it is not as likely to get to the bottom as it is to end up somewhere nearer the top. That is: it is not equally likely to show up at every spot 1 through 60. I believe (I could be wrong) that "sufficiently random" in the sense of shuffling means that information cannot be determined from the appearance of a single card, that is something like: if I shuffle and then reveal the top card, I have not gained any information about the next card (other than it is not the first card).
Or, suppose I put a specific card on top and then shuffle seven times. I then deal the cards out into four piles. Is the top card equally likely to appear in any of the four piles? That might be "sufficiently random" if you are talking about a game like bridge where the whole deck is used. But, perhaps not "sufficiently random" for a game like Magic where only a portion of the deck is in play at the start.
As an aside: I can mana weave if I follow that with a sufficient shuffle, right? Suppose I am fetching and notice three specific cards in a row, I would separate them, grab my land, and then shuffle. I wonder if I am doing something wrong.
When I sideboard, I put the cards that are coming in approximately equidistant from each other in the deck and then shuffle. I could put them all on top and then shuffle. Maybe I should.
After a long game, I pick up the cards in play and start shuffling. If I am not careful, I am likely to start this shuffle with 10+ lands all clumped together (and probably a bunch of mostly non lands clumped together that were once in the graveyard). Does this initial clumping affect things?
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"Because we cannot prevent draws in paper Magic we allow IDs. If we could prevent draws we would not have IDs in paper Magic. " Scott Larabee.
Third, if you did cheat at poker tables as you claim, there should be no reason to cheat at Magic. Since poker is your money making venture, cheating at something that you do socially and should be enjoyable makes no sense.
If you think money/goods/prize is the main motivator for cheating in games/sports you have a lot of rethinking to do.
I'm pretty sure people don't cheat without the intention to win. I don't think I have any rethinking to do.
Are you one of those who don't see any point in playing competitive rel magic besides winning ?
Neither player may know the absolute or relative position of any card.
However, magic isnt about science, and you just need a suffienctly random deck, for any realistic purpose.
Suppose you put a specific card on the top of your deck and then perform seven "good riffle shuffles". In practice, the card cannot end up on the bottom of the deck (those riffle shuffles would not be "good" if the card got that deep). Even if it is possible to get to the bottom of the deck, it is not as likely to get to the bottom as it is to end up somewhere nearer the top. That is: it is not equally likely to show up at every spot 1 through 60. I believe (I could be wrong) that "sufficiently random" in the sense of shuffling means that information cannot be determined from the appearance of a single card, that is something like: if I shuffle and then reveal the top card, I have not gained any information about the next card (other than it is not the first card).
If you perform good riffle shuffles as in the mathematic idea, you actual have a pretty solid random result, any card can be anywhere, patterns are broken.
For humans its usually better to strip a "half" from the middle of the deck and place that on top, than go for the next riffle, as that exactly combats the problem of the "top/bottom" heavy deal that is pretty obvisious if someone trys to make riffles only.
After the first bunch of iterations its true, but you dont just perform 3 riffle and stop, as that would indeed be bad.
For a "human" realistic purpose you would perform some cuts in between your riffles, and what makes it even more random is the fact that the "normal" shuffler will perform more or less bad riffles that are out of controll.
If you do "perfect" riffles, like cut in half and let them slide in 1by1 equally, then its a really bad shuffle that after enough iterations results in the very same deck you had at the beginning ; so its anything but random.
When I sideboard, I put the cards that are coming in approximately equidistant from each other in the deck and then shuffle. I could put them all on top and then shuffle. Maybe I should.
After a long game, I pick up the cards in play and start shuffling. If I am not careful, I am likely to start this shuffle with 10+ lands all clumped together (and probably a bunch of mostly non lands clumped together that were once in the graveyard). Does this initial clumping affect things?
It does indeed, if players shuffle very poorly, you will not break the patterns at all and just move a small amount of patterns around, which will still have a big impact on your result.
If you manaweave a deck and then just casually shuffle a little, it will overall still have its manaweaving.
If you perform a bunch of very casual riffles, you might even end up with more land clumps, as you simply did not perform enough riffles to break the patterns.
Its really common problem of riffles, players just do like ~3 or ~4 , and that is simply not enough, you really have to perform the necessary amount of riffles and do them as "random" (uncontrolled that is) as possible.
In the end we are humans, we will never archive "true" random results and we absolutely cant make sure a deck is allways mathematicly random.
It all depends that nobody knows any patterns and neither does know a position of a card in a deck, some cuts and riffles from 2 players will ensure its clean (as you might do a perfect riffle, your opponent is not, so its random again).
As magic involves a ton of shuffling with fetchlands and such, a "properly" random deck would involve a ton of shuffling, which uses up a lot of time and pretty much any player will skip the necessary amount, simply because its not fun to do so.
Just imagine you start with :
fetchland => shuffle, riffle 8 times, cut, present. Opponent riffles the deck 8 times again.
*That alone would take easily more than a minute, if not 2 or more and we have done absolute nothing except used a single fetchland.
If our opponent does the same and we repeat every turn, the game takes a tremendous amount of time just to shuffle decks. Thats not fun, and while it would be completly fine to shuffle the decks "properly" , we shortcut a lot of this and try to catch up some time.
Especially in EDH and other 100+ formats you will experience that someone tutors a card and picks up just the top say 20 cards, finds the basic land of choice and only casually puts the cards back in the deck. The result is not really random, but its totally enough for the usual magic player to not care anymore.
In general i would assume nobody really "cheats" in shuffling in any casual event if its all about fun. In higher level events, judges and players should have some knowledge what is a "legit" shuffle and what is not properly random, and know some common cheats to have a chance to glimpse at some.
Shuffling can be done fast and if you riffle 4 times and your opponent riffles your deck 4 times (and cuts it) , the deck is basicly as random as it will get (performing 4 riffles by 2 people is way superior to 8 riffles by 1 person for that matter).
Which is why I suggested a fix to that here--a cut that forbids the player from touching their own deck.
I don't play decks. I solve optimization problems.
Currently solving:
Standard: Too poor for this format.
Modern: GW Auras, Living End, WB TurboFog, UB Mill, UR Storm
Legacy: R Burn, GU Infect, RG Lands, B Contamination
I am not a master cheater, nor do I claim to be. I'm not here to garner attention. I have a very small amount of posts here, as I primarily lurk. My reputation/attention I get means nothing to me. I simply want to bring attention to an issue in magic. The title is admittedly a very click-bait title.
As for cheating in casual matches, I don't do it to win. I did it to see how easy it would be, to see if this is a real issue, and it is.
A table cut is then you cut the deck on the table. You don't get to lift the deck up with your hands as it allows for a plethora of hidden movements and sleights.
This would be a great addition to the current rules, and would solve many problems in one.
As many of you have expressed, a cut cannot combat mana-weaving, a possibility I clearly did not think of. That is why I posted this here to a forum full of people who play the game more than I do. This is meant to spur discussion on the issue. I don't know everything there is to know about Magic, and I don't claim to.
Also, I don't cheat in magic to win, I cheated to learn how easy it was, as well as to educate all of the players at my local store. Many of you may see it as a non-issue because you haven't experienced it and if you did, you likely wouldn't know. If I was cheating for profit, I would not have taken the time to anonymously post to arguably the largest MTG board on the internet.
Moving on.
This is a great example of a rather skilled card sleight that involved slipping the card to the top of the deck. Nothing fancy, just quick and fluid movements. This guy won the tournament and no one was the wiser. You may think I'm trying to sound like some cool teenage card superhero, but the reality is, there are loads of people out there like this guy, and they will cheat, and they will get away with it. This guy's only downfall was the cameras. Imagine what he does when there are none?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0zYMAhp570
Remember something. That guy won. I can't even begin to explain how terrible that is.
Say what you will. Say I'm shooting for attention. Whatever. I simply want to bring to attention how easy it is to cheat. Believe it or not, not all people with the ability to cheat do it for profit. Myself falling in that category. I want to take my knowledge of card sleights, educate others on how easy they are to miss, and hopefully bring an awareness.
This discussion where you guys point out the issues of just cutting the deck are great. I'm more a poker player than I am a magic player. Issues like mana weaving never occurred to me. But like it was mentioned above, adding a cut to the end of your opponent shuffling would be a great way to allow for shuffling a mana weave as well as cutting away an opponent's stacking of the cards. That is why I'm posting here, so as a community we can work the issue out. If you have any other gripes with me or with what I said, fire away, but also try to stay on topic. This is something that matters to me.
Many of you are missing the point. Watch the video I linked. That is a video of a man cheating at Star City Games Worcester, and getting away with it, then winning the tournament. Doesn't that worry any of you? He isn't the only one that cheats.
Cheating is real. It happens. The card sleights people are capable of doing under a watchful eye are very real, and not just backyard magic tricks. Whether any of you want to believe it or not, it happens, and I don't doubt for a second that any accomplished card shark could cheat right under your nose, and even after reading this thread and being more aware, he/she would still get away with it.
There's a couple reasons I can think of that we don't have a final cut of a player's own deck after shuffling.
1. Time cost. It's pretty quick but the deck does have to change hands again. If cutting is poorly defined, and the player wants to "cut" their deck into seven piles and reassemble them in some order than that's going to be an issue.
2. "Tutoring". While posters have pointed out that getting one card for sure in your starting hand isn't always as good as having a perfect mana weave, sometimes it is. When Quest for the Holy Relic was a standard deck with no way to search for that enchantment, I'd be willing to accept a 5 card hand with no other guarantees if I got a guarantee that card would be in every starting hand I took. If a card is marked, or maybe a player even can try to track that card's location while their opponent shuffles their deck, having the opportunity to make a final cut lets the player put a key card like that on top of their own deck. While if the opponent shuffles the deck without looking at the faces, he is unable to put the worst card on top or best card on bottom.
In spite of these reasons maybe a final cut would be worthwhile.
Or we could avoid random uncessisary steps by actually shuffling and not using a non shuffling technique
Grow up.
You and your friends cheat at Poker for profit (supposedly), yet you feel the need to work to raise community awareness of the potential issue in Magic? Why?
It's a game you clearly and admittedly aren't even that familiar with (if you were you would have immediately recognized the enormous flaw in your suggestion that I pointed out regarding the issues associated with not shuffling). Why care about it when clearly you don't have an issue with cheating/cheaters in your preferred game?
Just doesn't add up. Sounds like a kid who saw Rounders, put that together with recent cheating issues in Magic, and is now stirring the pot.
Why are we all focused on me? Focus on the discussion at hand. Honestly, I don't see the point in reasoning with any of you here. So much hostility and distrust.
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Your mileage may vary, though, because the judges don't necessarily want to go around shuffling every deck every time just to be cautious.
The only sleights you can easily do without moving your hands from the basic "comfortable" positions are false cuts, false shuffles, cutting to a marked card, and preserving a sequence of cards in order in some portion of the deck. We're not usually worried about people preserving the order of cards in the middle, just top/bottom, and in any case preserving the order of a set of cards requires first stacking them, which is quite hard to do without moving your hands from a basic "comfortable" position. Any time you want to move a single card around with thumb, pinky, or a drop, you have to position the passive hand to block the viewer from seeing the sleight, and doing that requires obvious changes in hand position. The hardest part of sleight of hand cheats like this is distracting your opponent from the hand position change.
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
And no matter what, if someone wants to cheat, they WILL cheat, and theres nothing you can do to prevent it.
People cheat even on camera and they even get away with it, as nobody looks that closely and maybe the camera angle simply did not catch it.
No matter what, if someone really wants to cheat and is willing to take the risk of getting caught (which mainly is becoming a social outlaw, secondary is the lengthly DCI banning) , theres nothing you can do to preven it.
HOWEVER , its a good start to give judges a good understand how basic cheats work, that should be part of what judges are told, as part of the rules to have an idea of what to look for.
For the players, cheaters should be a minor concern. You simply get paranoid and its not fun anymore if all you do is think how your opponent is going to cheat you.
As a player, you should focus on the game, the rest is a job for judges and other tournament officials.
Statistics help to find some very high potential cheaters.
If someone shuffles a deck and the opponent repeatly gets 0 lands or equally "unlikely" hands (we are talking about multiple opponents, same tournament and such, which are NOT just random) ; judges should use this open data to look more closely, if theres nothing, they wont find anything, but if its a blatant cheater you will find them over longer time periods.
Like in every PreRelease you can bet someone will bring cards, someone will cheat and put cards in the Limited Sealed Pool they are not allowed to use ; but still, if that player is more or less bad, it wont win the tournament anyway and its important to keep a "casual" atmosphere in such events, which by itself avoids some people that just want the prices.
If it comes to shuffling, its important that each player shuffles a deck. If just 1 does, all the cheating potential is in that players hands. If both players shuffle, each is responsible and each puts effort into making a deck as random as it gets.
If someone cheats, you will find out if you track some statistics.
No matter what you cant avoid cheaters all together, but its totally viable to track them down.
But again, keep that to the judges and a handfull of spectators that watch exactly for that.
The normal player should really not bother with cheaters at all, it will just make the game less enjoyable for you.
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Second, not buying your credibility story of how you cheat high stakes poker either, that sounds like the kind of fantasy they put in Hollywood films. The kind where you get your legs broken if you get caught. In poker tables you don't get to touch the deck either, so I'm not sure where your sleight of hand comes in.
Third, if you did cheat at poker tables as you claim, there should be no reason to cheat at Magic. Since poker is your money making venture, cheating at something that you do socially and should be enjoyable makes no sense. It'll be like if Lance Armstrong took PEDs on a mountain trail ride with friends.
I am especially wary of the new extra layer you have to punch through to make it to the Pro Tour. Making it even harder to get there means more incentive to cheat. I have stopped going to competitive REL events because wasting a whole day for a chance to waste another day before getting to go to the Pro Tour isn't appealing to me, especially when we know cheats/bad rulings can and do win these things, making playing a waste of time.
If you think money/goods/prize is the main motivator for cheating in games/sports you have a lot of rethinking to do.
I'm pretty sure people don't cheat without the intention to win. I don't think I have any rethinking to do.
This, or ask for your opponent to cut it. Really, it should be standard procedure to cut the deck at the end of whatever shuffling is done, whether it is your shuffling or your opponent's shuffling.
It matters what you consider random. Suppose you put a specific card on the top of your deck and then perform seven "good riffle shuffles". In practice, the card cannot end up on the bottom of the deck (those riffle shuffles would not be "good" if the card got that deep). Even if it is possible to get to the bottom of the deck, it is not as likely to get to the bottom as it is to end up somewhere nearer the top. That is: it is not equally likely to show up at every spot 1 through 60. I believe (I could be wrong) that "sufficiently random" in the sense of shuffling means that information cannot be determined from the appearance of a single card, that is something like: if I shuffle and then reveal the top card, I have not gained any information about the next card (other than it is not the first card).
Or, suppose I put a specific card on top and then shuffle seven times. I then deal the cards out into four piles. Is the top card equally likely to appear in any of the four piles? That might be "sufficiently random" if you are talking about a game like bridge where the whole deck is used. But, perhaps not "sufficiently random" for a game like Magic where only a portion of the deck is in play at the start.
As an aside: I can mana weave if I follow that with a sufficient shuffle, right? Suppose I am fetching and notice three specific cards in a row, I would separate them, grab my land, and then shuffle. I wonder if I am doing something wrong.
When I sideboard, I put the cards that are coming in approximately equidistant from each other in the deck and then shuffle. I could put them all on top and then shuffle. Maybe I should.
After a long game, I pick up the cards in play and start shuffling. If I am not careful, I am likely to start this shuffle with 10+ lands all clumped together (and probably a bunch of mostly non lands clumped together that were once in the graveyard). Does this initial clumping affect things?
Competitive REL? I play to win.
Anything else, not so much.
The definition is quite clear in magic.
Neither player may know the absolute or relative position of any card.
However, magic isnt about science, and you just need a suffienctly random deck, for any realistic purpose.
If you perform good riffle shuffles as in the mathematic idea, you actual have a pretty solid random result, any card can be anywhere, patterns are broken.
For humans its usually better to strip a "half" from the middle of the deck and place that on top, than go for the next riffle, as that exactly combats the problem of the "top/bottom" heavy deal that is pretty obvisious if someone trys to make riffles only.
After the first bunch of iterations its true, but you dont just perform 3 riffle and stop, as that would indeed be bad.
For a "human" realistic purpose you would perform some cuts in between your riffles, and what makes it even more random is the fact that the "normal" shuffler will perform more or less bad riffles that are out of controll.
If you do "perfect" riffles, like cut in half and let them slide in 1by1 equally, then its a really bad shuffle that after enough iterations results in the very same deck you had at the beginning ; so its anything but random.
It does indeed, if players shuffle very poorly, you will not break the patterns at all and just move a small amount of patterns around, which will still have a big impact on your result.
If you manaweave a deck and then just casually shuffle a little, it will overall still have its manaweaving.
If you perform a bunch of very casual riffles, you might even end up with more land clumps, as you simply did not perform enough riffles to break the patterns.
Its really common problem of riffles, players just do like ~3 or ~4 , and that is simply not enough, you really have to perform the necessary amount of riffles and do them as "random" (uncontrolled that is) as possible.
In the end we are humans, we will never archive "true" random results and we absolutely cant make sure a deck is allways mathematicly random.
It all depends that nobody knows any patterns and neither does know a position of a card in a deck, some cuts and riffles from 2 players will ensure its clean (as you might do a perfect riffle, your opponent is not, so its random again).
As magic involves a ton of shuffling with fetchlands and such, a "properly" random deck would involve a ton of shuffling, which uses up a lot of time and pretty much any player will skip the necessary amount, simply because its not fun to do so.
Just imagine you start with :
fetchland => shuffle, riffle 8 times, cut, present. Opponent riffles the deck 8 times again.
*That alone would take easily more than a minute, if not 2 or more and we have done absolute nothing except used a single fetchland.
If our opponent does the same and we repeat every turn, the game takes a tremendous amount of time just to shuffle decks. Thats not fun, and while it would be completly fine to shuffle the decks "properly" , we shortcut a lot of this and try to catch up some time.
Especially in EDH and other 100+ formats you will experience that someone tutors a card and picks up just the top say 20 cards, finds the basic land of choice and only casually puts the cards back in the deck. The result is not really random, but its totally enough for the usual magic player to not care anymore.
In general i would assume nobody really "cheats" in shuffling in any casual event if its all about fun. In higher level events, judges and players should have some knowledge what is a "legit" shuffle and what is not properly random, and know some common cheats to have a chance to glimpse at some.
Shuffling can be done fast and if you riffle 4 times and your opponent riffles your deck 4 times (and cuts it) , the deck is basicly as random as it will get (performing 4 riffles by 2 people is way superior to 8 riffles by 1 person for that matter).
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