Again I ask....Who said the deck shouldn’t be cut?
BG and I are responding to ReallyGoodUsername, who said cutting is not "completely standard:"
Also while I’d encourage most games to cut the deck it’s not a “completely standard part of poker” in home games.
(We both quoted him.)
We use “cut cards” and always have.. But in poker theproper term is a “bottom card” or a “shoe” as I mentioned in an earlier post. The cheap flimsy “cut cards” most use today for poker were originally for blackjack and games dealt from a dealers shoe.
I tried so hard not to get into this... I'm sorry, I have to disagree.
The people who market wares online are not the arbiters of terminology, although they do end up making certain terms mainstream for people who learn them by browsing catalogs.
I was taught (literally, in dealer training school in the late 80's) that the proper term in poker for the card we're talking about is a "cover card." My instructor told us that a lot of gambler in NJ will call them "cut cards" because they don't know any better, and they've all been handed cut cards at blackjack for years, and since we're there to let them have a good time, it's probably best to just ignore it - but it poker, it's a cover card. It's never used to cut. You use your hand to cut, and the procedure for the cut, despite being dead simple, is critically important, and that a gaming inspector watching our deal could get our house fined and our asses fired (and our dealing licenses revoked) if we did it wrong, so we'd better learn it properly.
I have never heard of them being referred to as a "bottom card." The phrase "bottom card" referred to the 52nd card in a deck. This was true in dealing, in gaming, in magic, and in all the literature I saw for all the above (I was an amateur magician in my teens.)
I have never heard of the card being referred to as a "shoe." That phrase was reserved for a case which holds multiple shuffled decks for dealing blackjack, baccarat, and the like.
I have also seen them referred to as "plastic cards." This is, of course, correct and literal! The words "cut card" and "cover card" describe how it's being used.
Ind the standard process for dealing blackjack out of a multi-deck shoe, you actually use both a cut card and a cover card... the same plastic card is used interchangeable for both. To be complete, the two cards play
three roles. The process:
1. You offer a plastic card to a player to later perform a cut. (The player to whom a plastic card was dealt, last hand.) This card is now a
cut card; the player will later stick it into the stack to cut it.
2. You do the collecting and shuffling of the cards, including >1 round of stacking & shuffling packets into stacks. (House shuffle procedure; it varies.)
3. Before the last pass of the house shuffle, you set a plastic card on the table and shuffle packets of cards onto it. This plastic card is now a
cover card.
4. After you've made one tall stack on top of the cover card, you knock the stack over and square it up against the shoe (which has a handy lip near the back to make this easy.) While the stack is on its side, the
cover card prevents the bottom card from being exposed.
5. You present the stack, sideways, to the player with the
cut card to stick it in there.
6. When you separate the stack at the cut point, each of the two stacks have the bottom card covered by a yellow card. They are now
both cover cards!
7. You slide the bottom stack on top, and remove that
cover card from the full stack.
8. You take that plastic card and set it at the casino-standard depth as a
shuffle indicator. They card has taken a third role! When this card is later dealt, the player who got it will be offered the next cut. But you don't give it to them yet - you put that plastic card under the front lip of the shoe to remind you to stop dealing after this hand.
9. After finishing the last deal, you put all the cards in the discards, empty the shoe, peel off the remaining cover card, and get the last of the cards into the discards.
10. At this point, you toss one of those two plastic cards to the player to whom it was dealt and start again. You can toss either one.
Thinner plastic cards are preferred for cutting (easier to slip in). Some people prefer a heavier card as a dedicated cover card at poker, but that's not a necessity. A heavy cover can be easier to find by feel if it gets mixed into the cards.
