Battle of Wits Deck and Shuffling

[GradStudentGuy]

I am sure everyone is aware that it is hard to sufficiently randomize a battle of wits deck in tournament play. In fact I would argue that most people cant. I ran into a person at a completive rel event who claimed to have found a way to do so. However during his shuffling I noticed that it was not truly random. I did not call a judge but I should have . The guy found a battle of wits in both games within 5 turns.
The guy would basically turn his 250 card deck into roughly five piles. He would shuffle the first pile then shuffle the current and next pile together and cut the deck in half. He would repeat this process with the next un shuffled pile with one of his shuffled ones. This process would continue until all five plies have been mixed. He would then stack the piles from first to last and present. Clearly a card from the first pile has a much higher probability of being on top the deck then at the bottom using this methodology. Would a Judge agree with me on this?

[Malchar]

Well technically there's no way to truly randomize a deck. It's not even required by the rules. I believe that the requirement is that you can't know the relative position of any two cards. It sounds like the method you talked about tends to put certain cards near the top of the deck, so it might be considered stacking. I'm not really an expert on this though.

As the opponent, you are allowed to shuffle the opponent's deck after they present. This should solve any potential problems.

[Justin]

Anytime an opponent presents you with a deck that you suspect has not been adequately "randomnized", you may call a judge to examine it for any evidence of stacking, etc. My advice for playing large decks such as Battle of Wits decks is to just shuffle them a lot. Obviously, this creates a dilemma when you are in a tournament and time is an issue.

[cdr]

Definition of shuffling from MTR:

Decks must be randomized at the start of every game and whenever an instruction requires it. Randomization is defined as bringing the deck to a state where no player can have any information regarding the order or position of cards in any portion of the deck. Pile shuffling alone is not sufficiently random.

"Order or position of cards" is the key. If you are sure after your opponent shuffles that he or you could know the order or position of cards, you should call a judge.

Shuffling a 200+ card deck is definitely not easy, but it can be done to the above standard. On the other hand, there are for sure a lot of people who don't put the necessary effort into it.