Provably Fair Deals
The oldest complaint about online sheepshead is "the deal is rigged." At Sheepshead Club you do not have to take our word that it is not. Every shuffle is locked in with a cryptographic commitment before any cards are dealt, and the proof is revealed when the hand ends. Anyone can check it, and the game does it for you with one click.
The short version
Each hand is dealt from a single secret number called a seed. The same seed always produces the exact same deal, so the seed is the whole shuffle. The trick is proving we picked the seed honestly, before we could see anyone's cards. We do that with a commit-and-reveal:
sha256 hash of it (mixed with the table and hand number). You can see this hash on the table the moment the hand begins, before a single card is played. A hash is a one-way fingerprint: it locks in the seed without revealing it.If the revealed seed hashes to the commitment shown before the cards came out, the deck could not have been stacked, reshuffled, or peeked at. That is what "provably fair" means: not "trust us," but "check us."
Verify it yourself, in one click
When a hand ends, the table shows the revealed seed with a Verify deal button. Click it and Sheepshead Club, running entirely in your own browser:
- recomputes the
sha256commitment from the revealed seed and checks it against the hash that was published before the hand, and - replays that seed through the same dealing code to reproduce every hand at the table, so you can see the deal was exactly what the seed produces.
A green result means the math checks out. None of this is sent back to us; the verification happens on your device against numbers you were shown.
Doing it by hand
For the truly skeptical, the commitment is plain sha256 of tableId:handNum:seed. Take the seed and the table and hand identifiers shown on the table, hash that string with any sha256 tool, and compare it to the commitment. It will match. The deal itself is produced by our dealing routine from the seed, which is deterministic, so the same seed always deals the same cards.
What we keep
Every hand is recorded, because that is what makes the fairness check possible after the fact and lets us audit how the bots actually play. The record is the deal itself: the seed, the cards, who took what.
If you are signed in, hands you played are linked to your account for 7 days, so you can come back and look at a hand from another device. After 7 days that link is dropped and the hand goes back to being an anonymous record. Play as a guest and no link is ever made; your history lives in your browser and nowhere else.
We do not sell this, and it is not used to build a profile of you. It exists so you can check the deal and so we can catch our own bugs.
Why we bother
Most card sites ask you to trust an invisible shuffle. We think a game played for bragging rights, ladder position, and the occasional tournament prize deserves better than trust. Provably fair dealing is the one thing no amount of marketing can fake, and it is the clearest promise we can make: the cards you are dealt are the luck of the draw, nothing more. Free to play, no chips, no ads, and a deck you can audit. Read the rules, then pull up a chair.