Advanced Encrypted Dealing

In default dealing a separate dealer process shuffles the deck, so it knows the whole deck; after the hand, players can check the cards they may see with shuffle and decryption proofs. Advanced encrypted dealing has the players’ clients shuffle and encrypt the deck together: the server coordinates betting without holding all the secrets needed to decrypt unrevealed hole cards. A host can enable it in an all-human room without bots, and it uses practice chips.

Each player’s client generates its own secret share, then the clients take turns permuting and re-encrypting the deck, attaching shuffle proofs that can be checked. Opening any card needs every participant’s decryption contribution: other players contribute for your hole cards, and you finish decrypting locally with your own secret, which is never sent to the server. So the server sees only public actions, board cards and legal showdown reveals, and unshown folded cards stay encrypted after the hand.

This mode has no server-run bots, and ordinary Coach analysis does not accept encrypted hands. The protocol transcript is not currently saved with the hand as an independently replayable proof, and the default-dealing verifier does not apply to it. It needs everyone’s cooperation: if an honest drop or timeout leaves a required contribution missing, the hand is voided and stakes are returned, and after an announcement later hands use default dealing.

The mode retains trust in the operator and client program; it is not trustless. An operator could still abort hands, change the client or manipulate settlement, and a compromised device is outside its protection. Public source does not prove which binary the live service runs, and it is not a third-party security audit. See fair dealing and card privacy for a comparison of the two modes.