"Give 'em a good wash, would ya?"

I heard the request quoted in the title of this post at Harrah's the other day. It's hardly the first time.

A "wash," in dealer-ese, is the process of scrambling the cards face-down on the table before gathering them up and commencing the standard riffle shuffle. It's a routine and important part of the whole hand-shuffling procedure.

But what's odd is that sometimes players will request that the dealer do this before placing the deck into an autoshuffler. That was the case at Harrah's. There was a regular at the Hilton poker room that used to request this on a regular basis.

Maybe I'm the wrong person to write blog posts about the idiotic things that people say and do at the poker table, because I really want to be asking about them, rather than explaining them. As far as I can tell, there is no rational explanation for them. For the life of me I can't understand what goes through player's brains that makes them submit such a request.

It might help (though I really think the details don't matter) to understand how casino autoshufflers work. It's kind of mysterious if all you do is watch the dealer insert one deck and take out the next one. But how the things work isn't exactly a secret. The manufacturer, Shufflemaster (Shufflemaster's market dominance is so complete that I've never even once seen a casino using any other kind of machine, and I don't even know if any competitors exist), isn't shy about explaining it, and it's all laid out in detail in its patents.* For example (from http://tinyurl.com/yqsg8e):

The microprocessor randomly assigns potential positions for each card
within the initial set of playing cards, and then directs the device to arrange
the initial set of playing cards into those randomly assigned potential
positions to form a randomized final set of playing cards.

In other words, it has a computerized random number generator that determines a random order into which to place the 52 cards. It picks them off of the bottom of the used deck one by one and sticks them into pre-assigned spots in what will become the newly shuffled deck. This isn't to say that the machine has decided that the queen of diamonds will be at position #32 in the completed deck; it doesn't know which card is which (although I see now, looking at Shufflemaster's web site, that it has a new model that does exactly that; see http://www.shufflemaster.com/02_eu_products/utility_products/shufflers/shufflers_sd/i-deal.asp). It simply determines that, say, the current bottom card of the deck, whatever it may be, will go to position #19 in the final reassembled deck, the next card from the bottom will go to position #46 in the reassembled deck, etc.

Of course, the order that the cards are in when the dealer drops the deck into the machine is a key factor determining the order of the newly shuffled deck. So "washing" the cards, as opposed to simply gathering them up, definitely does alter the order that the cards will be in when they emerge from the machine two hands from now.

But the important thing conceptually is that it's a random order either way. You could have the dealer take a few minutes and put the deck back into the same order it was in when it came from the factory, with each suit in consecutive order of rank, and you'd still get a randomly shuffled deck out of the machine when it was done. (For stories of how poker hands go down when you accidentally use such a factory-ordered, unshuffled deck, see Steve Zolotow's column at http://www.cardplayer.com/author/article/all/57/8510.) It would be a different order than the one you'd get if the dealer just scooped up the cards and placed them in the shuffler, which would also be a different order than the one that you'd get if the dealer were to "give 'em a good wash," which would be different from the one that you'd get if the dealer went through the full hand-shuffle routine and then dropped the deck in the machine. But they would all be random.

Perhaps even more crucial to grasp, though I think this should be obvious, is that how the final order of the deck changes as a result of the wash is precisely as likely to hurt any given player as to help him. For all you know, when the dealer does the wash you request, it sets you up to have pocket kings when an opponent has pocket aces, or to be the one with the aces when the guy with the kings will hit quads against you with them, outcomes that would not have occurred without the wash.

In short, it's just a waste of time and effort.

I assume that players do this when they've had a run of unplayable hands or bad beats and they want to change their luck, in much the same way that they ask for a new setup (i.e., a different pair of decks to be brought to the table; see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2006/11/new-setup-youre-moron.html), or insist that the dealer make the final cut of the deck higher or lower. Yes, you change the circumstances of the next hand, but in a way that has exactly zero positive expected value for you and for every other player.

I really wish I could get one of these imbeciles to explain to me in detail what they believe they're accomplishing with the wash request. Presumably they must believe that it acts to their advantage, or they wouldn't bother, right? But no rational mind could possibly believe that--which is why my rational mind can't grasp what's going on.

My best guess is that their thought process--if that term can be applied at all--is something like this: "Well, the standard procedure that the dealer is using every time is resulting in me getting crummy cards for the past half an hour. So I should have the dealer do something different." And that's as far as the analysis goes. Standard process is treating me about as bad as it can get, so anything different must necessarily be an improvement.

But even as I type that out, I think that surely can't really be it, because two seconds of critical thought would dash the notion all to pieces, and I'd like to believe that most of my fellow humans are capable of two seconds of sustained rational thought.

The evidence, though, is to the contrary, sad to say.



*Incidentally, Shufflemaster didn't used to sell its devices to non-institutional buyers, but it has apparently recently changed this policy, so if you'd like to have your own to speed up your home games, it can be yours for just $15,795 (see http://www.shufflemaster.com/02_eu_products/utility_products/shufflers/shufflers_sd/deck_mate.asp). I guess I'm a tad late with this announcement for those who wanted one for Christmas. Sorry about that.


Addendum, March 1, 2008

See the story about Sam Grizzle at today's heads-up championship round, at http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/poker-blog/2008/03/362_nbc_headsup_championship_12_highlights_from_high_noon.php.