Dealing Sheet
This is a sheet containing one or more permutation lines with which to deal by. The idea is, instead of shuffling the deck several times and dealing regularly, one simply treats a line from the list as the order of piles in which to place cards. (Compare with regular dealing, which would look like 1234 1234 1234...)
With an experienced dealer, it can be faster than seven riffle shuffles. (Seven is widely believed to be the ideal number of good shuffles for a properly random deck. See WP:Shuffling.)
Obviously, in the interests of good entropy, you shouldn't reuse a line. You can either cross off a line after use, or cross off the line above the line you're about to use. The latter sounds crazy, but means you don't forget after dealing...
Where to get one
You can:- Flip a coin a lot of times and get very bored
- Write a program to print them for you
- Use the CGI to produce a plain text, postscript or PDF sheet.
What's in the CGI
- deallines.c is the main under-the-hood source. It implements Knuth shuffling and outputs a number of dealing lines. It's standard, if quickly cobbled together, C, and opens /dev/urandom to use as its entropy source.
- dealsheet.pl is the actual CGI, which relies on having a2ps and ps2pdf on its path. (It runs as me under the ucgi mechanism on chiark.)