A Better Way to Deal the Cards

Most of the work on card shuffling assumes that all the cards in a deck are distinct, and that in a well-shuffled deck all orderings need to be equally likely. We consider the case of decks with repeated cards and decks which are dealt into hands, as in bridge and poker. We derive asymptotic formulas for the randomness of the resulting games. Results include the influence of where a poker deck is cut, and the fact that switching from cyclic dealing to back-and-forth dealing will improve the randomness of a bridge deck by a factor of 13.