Davekapiti, on 2019-August-04, 23:58, said:
Dave,
If the powers behind Big Deal say that BBO has a good hand generator, I strongly trust that BBO has a good hand generator. The authors behind that generator have excellent knowledge of both the math behind good generators and the statistics to validate them. That theory knowledge has excellent backing by good computer programming to turn the theory into practice.
I have a very minor philosophical quibble with Big Deal. It samples the population of all possible bridge hands without replacement (Big Deal would deal every possible bridge hand exactly once before it repeated a hand (perhaps, a desirable property if you want to be certain that the hands for your tournament will have no duplicates). Philosophically, I feel that the sampling should be conducted with replacement (There is a tiny chance {several orders of magnitude larger than Planck's constant but still quite small} that a set of a few thousand hands for a large tournament would contain one or more duplicates.) The practical difference is that once in several human lifetimes we are very unlikely to see a headline about two identical hands at the same tournament versus never seeing two identical hands at the same tournament. That is, no practical difference.
You may have built a "feel" for what "random" bridge hands should resemble from playing shuffle and play events (e.g., local club games, KO teams, and Swiss teams). To get genuinely random hands via shuffle and play, every hand would need to be shuffled seven or more times. How likely is that? What proportion of the hands will be shuffled one or two (at best three) times before dealing? Inadequate shuffling will skew the hand distribution towards deals with four balanced hands each with 8-12 HCP (e.g., lots of 3-2, 2-2, and 3-1 trump splits and way to few 4-0, 4-1, and 5-0 trump splits). Players who encounter randomly distributed hands when they leave the sheltered waters of their local shuffle and play club for the first time will have their instincts for how the cards should break thoroughly battered.