Author: Bob - Page 20 - Robert J Wallace

December 9, 2020December 18, 2020

Finding the Aces – the hard way

Here is something I am playing with.

The starting position is two aces on top and two on the bottom. Shuffle the deck keeping the aces on top and bottom.

December 7, 2020December 7, 2020

Texas Hold-em stacks

A couple of years ago I wrote a post titled “Finding the aces with Erdnase” where I used Erdnase’s system of overhand shuffle to stack the aces at know positions in the deck.

The positions I used were 10x cards, Ace, 1x card, Ace, 5x cards, and the last Ace. In this post I generalize that method to place the aces at whatever locations you want.

December 7, 2020September 6, 2023

In the normal method of riffle stacking you start with the four aces on top. When you do the shuffles you hold back cards with both the right and left hands, dropping the cards held by the left thumb under the cards held back by the right thumb. At each shuffle the number of cards held back by the left stays the same, but those held by the right decrease.

November 27, 2020July 18, 2023

Adding links to web pages in Home Assistant

I have been playing around with Home Assistant for just a little while now, and while I am impressed with what it does, I find the documentation and the examples to be less than helpful. One thing I wanted to do was simply add a “card” of web links to the UI. Since the Home Assistant interface (Lovelace) is web based you would think that this would be easy.

November 27, 2020June 14, 2021

Perspective on card shuffling

The largest U.S. manufacture of playing cards sells approx. 100,000,000
decks of playing cards per year. This can be expressed as 10⁸.

November 15, 2020November 22, 2020

Home automation, part 2

This is an update to https://robertjwallace.com/home-automation-smart-home/.

I am finally beginning to move from the X10 system to a more modern system, despite the cost. My existing system is an hybrid of Philips Hue and X10. To integrate the X10 with Alexa I use the X10 CM19 transceiver with the mochad linux driver, and ha-bridge, a Philips Hue emulator. This allowed me to use Alexa to control the X10 system.

September 30, 2020September 6, 2023

Riffle stack

This is something I am playing with.

Effect

The basic effect is that four aces are placed into the deck at random locations and then the deck is shuffled multiple times. Then five hands of poker are dealt out, with the dealer getting the four aces.

Riffle shuffle stacking

Method

September 15, 2020September 15, 2020

Another cutting the aces

Here is another method for cutting the aces. You start with a well shuffled deck. I usually have the spectator shuffle the deck several times.

Take the deck back and perform my “two step cull“, which will bring the aces to the top of the deck.

July 8, 2020August 11, 2020

CATO

This is a simple four ace trick that is self working using the CATO principal (Cut and Turn Over). I present it as a lesson in fate, that your choices in life don’t always matter.

Start with four Aces on the table, face up. Add three face down cards on top of each Ace.

May 16, 2020June 30, 2020

I am a cat lover

I have to admit that I am a cat lover. I can tolerate dogs, some I even like. But cats have my heart. One thing I enjoyed when I was traveling was seeing and taking photographs of cats.