Amelie pile counts her deck, she shuffles a number of times using 2 shuffling techniques. She than presents the deck to Nigel. Nigel picks up the deck and does some riffle shuffling, places the deck in front of him and cuts three piles (to rearrange the three stacks later). At this point one of the three piles has a card on top that is face-up.

You are called over and investigate. Amelie says: “I have pile counted so I'm sure I saw that all cards were face-down. I have not really noticed something strange during shuffling after the pile count”. Nigel says kind of the same: “I have only riffle shuffled it would surprise me if I flipped over a card in between shuffling”.

I concluded that this is clearly an accident, but my question:
- Is there an infraction, if so which one? (Amelie found it very disturbing that a key card of her deck was seen by her opponent)
- What would happen if we found out after six draws in the game that this card came on top face up? Would it be any different?

I gave no infraction but told both players to be careful and vigilant during shuffling. But wondered if this has happened before and what the infraction would be if this was noticed halfway the game.

Edited Niki Lin (July 28, 2014 06:37:23 AM)

Even though this sounds like an accident, I would probably give a warning for L@EC to Nigel, just to be able to track it. In the end, he did look at the face of a card he was not entitled to see.

This is largely going to be ‘had to be there’ but I'd want to know how Amelie was shuffling, as that seems to be the point by description where something stands a reasonable chance of going wrong. Her method of pile counting may be in question as well, not for anything fishy but for potential ease by which one can miss two cards unknowingly stuck together.

As for infraction/fix, LEC is pretty clearly the order of the day, as this card was not entitled to be seen by either/any player at this point in the game; the question is who committed it, which will likely require some investigation and judgment.

I don't believe it's any harder/different to fix if it's mid-game. Follow normal LEC guidelines.

I asked Amelie, she demonstrated three very normall shuffling techniques that the opponent confirmed. (So let us for arguments sake exclude shenanigans with faux shuffles).

When an opponent is clumsy at how he is holding his hand or how he is shuffling and an opponent sees a card because of his opponent being clumsy we don't issue a warning for L@EC. I followed this logic, and I agree that the original scenario doesn't cover this scenario, but I found it resembling this scenario way more so I concluded to not give a penalty.

Giving Nigel a warning is basicly saying to Nigel: “Look I don't know what happened but I conclude you did it on purpose or you were the clumsy one” and that was in this case really not the message that I wanted to give.

Edited Niki Lin (July 30, 2014 10:15:41 AM)