Do online slot online rooms use burn cards? Every few weeks someone asks me this. In a live poker game, before each round of cards after the first is dealt, the card on top of the deck is “burned” – discarded. They do this in order to reduce the ability of cheaters to recognize a marked card on top of the deck and gain an unfair advantage. Since the top card is not used, there’s much less (but still some) value in knowing what it is.
In online poker rooms that particular form of cheating is impossible, since there are no actual cards to mark, which raises the question: do online poker rooms still burn a virtual card before they deal, and if not, does it change the odds?
The short answer is: it doesn’t matter and no.
Since there is no actual deck of cards, burning a card …