Guynoire said:
…if a deck of cards is completely randomly distributed then all 52! permutations are equally likely. You can't predict the order of the cards then.
Why not? It doesn’t matter that each outcome is equally likely if you can recognize which outcome just happened. Just because the
average outcome is randomly distributed doesn’t mean that each
individual iteration is not predictable.
For example, the top card of the deck
should be an ace (or any rank for that matter) 1/13th of the time. If each rank is randomly distributed then it
will be an ace 1/13th of the time, but we might still be able to predict when that happens and when it doesn’t. If the dealer flashes the top card after every shuffle then we will know exactly what rank it is every time, but the distribution (the average number of times the top card is any given rank) can still be completely random. Shuffle tracking, sequencing, glimpsing and reading marks are other ways to predict the final outcome of a shuffle even though it will, on average, be randomly distributed.
As another example, I’ll flip a fair coin several times. Each outcome is equally likely on every flip, but if I watch closely I might be able to determine which side it just landed on. Each flip is completely random and the average result at the end of the experiment will be 50/50 but I can still predict what the results are. There's a great story about how Ken Uston fell for that very scam. He lost about $9,400 to
a guy in AC who could predict coin flips to some degree. The guy didn't influence the coin to be biased so the results were completely random, but he still got an advantage over Uston.
-Sonny-