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Provably Fair Deals

The oldest complaint about online sheepshead is "the deal is rigged." On Schmear 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:

1. Commit. When a hand starts, the server picks a random seed and publishes the 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.

2. Play. The hand plays out. Because the hash is already public, the server cannot change the seed now. Any different deal would produce a different hash, and the one on the table would no longer match.

3. Reveal. When the hand ends, the server reveals the actual seed. Now anyone can hash it again and confirm it matches the fingerprint published in step 1, and can replay the seed to reproduce the exact deal everyone just played.

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 Schmear, running entirely in your own browser:

recomputes the sha256 commitment 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.

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.

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