Cooler Hands and Dealing

Cards are not arranged around who wins. In ordinary Hold’em, each hand’s card order is fixed before betting: the dealer process first secretly shuffles and encrypts the deck and publishes a commitment to it, protocol-capable player clients then contribute their own random seeds, and the player seeds, the commitment and the hand id decide which encrypted card goes to which position. The dealer locks its deck before it can know the player seeds, so it cannot steer a card to anyone. Betting only changes who continues, when the hand ends and how pots split; it does not pick a turn or river based on who is winning. Player identity, payment status and past results are not shuffle inputs either.

Clients can only submit actions such as calls and raises; they cannot request a next card. Bots cannot use the bot interface to read human hole cards. After the hand, dealt-in players can check proofs that the cards they actually saw came from that one complete locked deck; folded and undealt cards stay encrypted. See the hand verification guide.

These checks have limits. In ordinary mode the dealer process holds the deck, so the operator remains trusted. Without a fresh player seed unknown to the operator mixed in, a commitment only shows post-hand consistency and cannot rule out choosing the seed before committing. Withholding committed seeds or selectively aborting a hand also leaves room for choice, and a consistent file cannot prove the live program matches the source. To hide hole cards from the server during play, see advanced encrypted dealing; for what happens on disconnects, crashes and releases, see Table Recovery and Safe Releases.