People tend to perceive true randomness as having patterns, and expect randomness to mean the same as 'evenly distributed'. Image B has the rule that every dot must be at a minimum distance from every other dot. Most people say that image B is the random one, but it's actually image A.

Which of these two images is a random distribution of dots, and which one has some underlying rule? This mistaken belief is called the Gambler's Fallacy. This obviously is beyond the capabilities of a coin. For that to be the more likely outcome, the coin would somehow have to be “remembering” what the past results were, and using that information to determine the next result. If I flip a fair coin 10 times and get heads every time, it is not more likely to come up tails next time. I just want to go over what it means for something to be “random”.Ī common misconception about random chance is that an event can be “due”. Don’t worry- I’m not going to bombard you with a bunch of probabilities and calculations. Once we’re done, you’ll be able to explain exactly what randomness means as a concept and why certain ways of shuffling are better than others.īefore we talk about actual shuffling of a deck, let’s talk about randomness itself.

This article is a bit longer than you might be used to, but I guarantee it’s worth the read.

Instead of just talking about the common shuffling methods and which ones are the best, I’m going to go over exactly what randomness is, how it applies to real-life shuffling, and what the different shuffling methods actually do to the cards in your deck. In this article, I’m going to try a slightly different approach. There have been many articles written about shuffling, and yet a lot of people still don’t understand it very well.

Randomly shuffled deck of cards online