Hello,

TE-IS:

Definition

A deck is not shuffled if the judge believes a player could know the position or distribution of one or more cards in his or her deck.



Philosophy


Any time cards in a deck could be seen, including during shuffling, it is no longer shuffled, even if the player only knows the position of one or two cards. Players are expected to take care in shuffling not to reveal cards to themselves, their teammates, or their opponents.

So far so good, shuffling your deck with cards faced towards you seems to fit the infraction.

But when we look at the examples in GPE-LEC we can find:

C. A player sees the bottom card of her deck when presenting it to her opponent for
cutting/shuffling

And this brought some confusion.

Any insight on what this C example is different from Insufficient Shuffling while the first part of my quote clearly states it should be IS?

Thanks,
Àre

I suspect the difference is probably that, once you go to present your deck, that's the point where the “shuffling” is deemed finished. So if you see something it's L@EC.

Mark is correct; Insufficient Shuffling can only occur while shuffling. Interestingly, it's at the point when a player presents that we know they're saying they shuffled “enough”, and we might tell them they didn't. We don't normally assess Insufficient Shuffling during the act of shuffling, since we can't know if it might still become sufficient.

d:^D

If you can see the bottom card of your library, your deck isn't shuffled. What that means is if a player does 20 riffle shuffles with the bottom card facing him, then does an overhand shuffle before presenting, Policy considers this the same as if the player did no shuffling whatsoever except for a single overhand shuffle.

If you finish shuffling, present, and accidentally catch a peak, that's LEC.

For some players, they do so because they have a way to cheat out of this. Some are so good to put the bottom card on the top while it looks like just a normal shuffle, and some players can also take advantage by see and change cards of their opponent's deck, which makes it even worse. If you see those kind of players in tournament, that's the time for you take more “care” of.

–John B

There are legitimate reasons to shuffle with the card faces towards you. Off the top of my head:
* because the player isn't confident that they can riffle without letting their opponent see the bottom card.
* because they plan on following with face down riffles and they are trying to pre-bend the cards in the other direction so they stay flatter.

The key is to make sure that they shuffle sufficiently after they finish the face-up riffles and that they don't take too much time in the entire shuffling procedure.

Edited Riki Hayashi (Oct. 12, 2016 10:46:56 AM)

Originally posted by Riki Hayashi:

There are legitimate reasons to shuffle with the card faces towards you. Off the top of my head:
* because the player isn't confident that they can riffle without letting their opponent see the bottom card.
* because they plan on following with face down riffles and they are trying to pre-bend the cards in the other direction so they stay flatter.

The key is to make sure that they shuffle sufficiently after they finish the face-up riffles and that they don't take too much time in the entire shuffling procedure.

I'm not sure I agree with this. By policy, if you're looking at the bottom card of the deck, the deck is not randomized even if you're shuffling the top 59. Don't all the old arguments against pile “shuffling”* apply here as well?

*(either you're shuffling enough that to erase the effect of the pile, in which case it's a waste of time; or, you're not shuffling enough to erase the pile, in which case you're not properly randomizing)

Originally posted by Eli Meyer:

Riki Hayashi
There are legitimate reasons to shuffle with the card faces towards you. Off the top of my head:
* because the player isn't confident that they can riffle without letting their opponent see the bottom card.
* because they plan on following with face down riffles and they are trying to pre-bend the cards in the other direction so they stay flatter.

The key is to make sure that they shuffle sufficiently after they finish the face-up riffles and that they don't take too much time in the entire shuffling procedure.

I'm not sure I agree with this. By policy, if you're looking at the bottom card of the deck, the deck is not randomized even if you're shuffling the top 59. Don't all the old arguments against pile “shuffling”* apply here as well?

*(either you're shuffling enough that to erase the effect of the pile, in which case it's a waste of time; or, you're not shuffling enough to erase the pile, in which case you're not properly randomizing)

While I would not put words into Riki's mouth, I would offer that “shuffling with the card faces towards you” is not necessarily the same as “looking at the bottom card of the deck”. If the player is attempting to shuffle their deck without showing the card faces to the opponent, and making the effort to avoid seeing any cards in their deck while they shuffle, then that may be reasonable.

To add just a bit to Brian's point, shuffling a few times with the cards facing you takes a few seconds. Even a fast pile can take much, much longer.

d:^D

Originally posted by Brian Schenck:

While I would not put words into Riki's mouth, I would offer that “shuffling with the card faces towards you” is not necessarily the same as “looking at the bottom card of the deck”. If the player is attempting to shuffle their deck without showing the card faces to the opponent, and making the effort to avoid seeing any cards in their deck while they shuffle, then that may be reasonable.

It may not be _cheating_, but I don't think it's _reasonable_. Educate these players about how to shuffle without either playing being able to see them.

Originally posted by Matthew Johnson:

It may not be _cheating_, but I don't think it's _reasonable_. Educate these players about how to shuffle without either playing being able to see them.

Matthew, I don't see how we're disagree. Quite completely, I agree that the player should be shuffling in a way that neither they nor their opponent should be able to observe the faces of the cards in the player's deck. If the player takes appropriate measures to ensure that they can't observe the faces of the cards in their deck while shuffling, which is what I said, how is that unreasonable?

Or is there some specific comment to which you are taking issue?

Originally posted by Brian Schenck:

Matthew Johnson
It may not be _cheating_, but I don't think it's _reasonable_. Educate these players about how to shuffle without either playing being able to see them.

Matthew, I don't see how we're disagree. Quite completely, I agree that the player should be shuffling in a way that neither they nor their opponent should be able to observe the faces of the cards in the player's deck. If the player takes appropriate measures to ensure that they can't observe the faces of the cards in their deck while shuffling, which is what I said, how is that unreasonable?

Or is there some specific comment to which you are taking issue?

Oh, I see. I think that if someone could see the cards if they looked down, but they say “oh, but I never look down”, that's not good enough, because that's really hard to check and quite open for abuse. I think we should be instructing these players on a way to shuffle that doesn't put the cards in a _potentially_ visible position