How Trustworthy Are Electronic Cards?

I’ve wondered that for some time. Unlike real cards, electronic cards are shuffled using an algorithm. If real cards are not shuffled thoroughly, there will sometimes be suits that run together; a hand of three aces may turn up in the next hand, as may a straight, either in the hand of one player or around the table. Weird stuff can happen. I can think of two instances, one from the 1970s and another from the 1980s. In the first, two of us were playing stud heads up, and one of us had a straight flush. Then there were similar combinations coming up. A third player joined the game, and the weird stuff stopped dead.

Another time I was watching a game of 5 card stud at Birmingham; one player won a hand with a flush, and the very next hand the same player had another flush. I believe the suits were clubs and diamonds although I can’t remember in which order they appeared. The loser was dismayed because he couldn’t believe this could happen twice in a row in a game where a flush is a rarity, but there was no sleight-of-hand involved.

If you play games with more than one deck, all sorts of weird stuff happens; in the game called seventy-nine, which is played with four decks shuffled together, I have on many occasions seen players dealt hands that require no play, or maybe a player calls with his first draw. All the same, I can’t help feeling there is something not quite right with electronic cards. Here are a few examples.