I looked through the FAQ and help center and I didn’t find anything.
My question is, is the deck played in an order or does the server create the cards as needed?
If a player kicks himself for not staying in a pot, would the cards that came up actually be the same if he had stayed in?
For each hand, they start with an ordered deck like you would get if you opened a brand new deck of cards. Then they generate a random number, and use that number to select one of the cards, which is moved to start a new deck.
Next they generate a new random number, select another card, and move it to the new deck. They keep doing this until all the cards have been selected and the new deck is built. This new deck is as random as they can make it.
The cards are dealt from the top, as you would with any game.
The deck doesn’t “remember” anything about previous hands, or who is in each hand, or if this player or that has bought chips or has a lot of chips or doesn’t have many chips. It neither knows nor cares who is in any particular seat, or anything at all about any specific players.
A new deck is generated for each hand.
As a programmer, this is how I would do it. I don’t know how we can know that this is how Replay implemented it, without auditing their code, or taking the word of someone who has seen the code. But it’s how I would assume they would have done it.
This is how one of the devs said they do it, in a post from 2015. (I think it was 2015) It was in the “fairness debate” thread.
I found the original post and copy/pasted it into another thread a month or so ago, but my half-hearted searches for it came up blank, so meh.
Anyway, that’s the way they said they did it.
Good enough for me!
Knowing that there is a complete pre shuffled deck that is dealt off the top is what I hoped was the case, and is! Thanks for that.
sometimes I wonder about that. countless times have chase and chase and chase and chase… straights/flushes yet I don’t connect, but soon as I fold I would had connected and would’ve won. seems funny how that works.
This is gatzby’s explanation. At the time he was the ‘go to’ guy at Replay
gatzby
We do take our random number generator seriously, enough that we’ve had it certified: http://www.gamingassociates.com/certificate/ReplayPoker_Certificate.pdf
While we do make money by selling play chips, it doesn’t make sense to rig the game – nobody wants to play an unfair hand of poker, least of all us. We genuinely enjoy the game and want to make sure other people can too. No fair games, no players, no poker, right? That would be super boring!
In our system, random is truly random. The dealer program has no regard for player history or what cards you’ve been dealt in the past, nor does it account for the cards that have been dealt previously at the table. It does not calculate the types of hands that will be dealt and it certainly does not favor one player over another.
Here’s how the dealer works: For each hand, we create a new deck deck of cards ordered lowest to highest. A card is then randomly selected from that deck and put it into another deck. This process is repeated until every card has been randomly selected from the first deck and moved to the second deck. After the second (entirely random) deck is complete, the dealing process begins from the top of the deck just as you would have in real life poker. As mentioned before, this process has absolutely no knowledge of anybody’s hands or previous decks.
What you might be seeing is the scale at which the dealer is working, which is certainly much larger than any one dealer in a casino. Say you’re dealing with a million hands per day – that’s still 320,400 AK flips per day.
Obviously that math isn’t the best, since the chances of getting AK pockets are going to vary too, but it’s still a heck of a lot of hands, most of which one player couldn’t sit through without getting bed sores!
Thanks @feelmysins, that was the exact post I referred to. Good job digging it out.
Thank you. I just asked today whether there was a review of this subject ( the random number generator ) after the recent changes last year because the randomness appeared to change from the previous format.
I hope that a review was completed that it’s still being done.
Thanks for the info.
I’ve seen a lot of weird spins, for example a lot of three-of-a-kind on the flop, five suited, top two pair on the turn or a full straight (although the latter two not so often as to be out of place) … Obviously not being able to predict this does not benefit any of the players at the table, but the number of times the highest points are rolled is definitely out of probability.