Comparing dealing methods with repeating cards

Abstract

In a recent work Conger and Howald derived asymptotic formulas for the randomness, after shuffling, of decks with repeating cards or all-distinct decks dealt into hands. In the latter case the deck does not need to be fully randomized: the order of cards received by a player is indifferent. They called these cases the "fixed source" and the "fixed target" case, respectively, and treated them separately. We build on their results and mix these two cases: we obtain asymptotic formulas for the randomness of a deck of repeating cards which is shuffled and then dealt into hands of players. We confirm that switching from ordered to cyclic dealing, or from cyclic to back-and-forth dealing improves randomness in a similar fashion than in the non-repeating "fixed target" case. Our formulas allow to improve even the back-and-forth dealing when the deck only contains two types of cards.