Card Shuffling

I was playing around with building a card game engine and ran across something interesting.  My solution as I found all over the internet was to use Random() to generate a random number and use that to "order" the list (array) representing the deck.

My "test" game was basically high card where each player had a deck and drew a card.  The person with the highest card won the hand.  As I ran the test either Player 1 won or the game was a draw.  Player 2 never won.

As it turns out Random is not very good at generating random numbers. It uses a fixed algorithm such that the result are very predictable.  Also, it is an expensive operation as it is not very efficient.

A sort is actually a better solution and using sometime to generate random unique values works better.  I don't take credit for this code but here is an example of the better implementation:

var cards = Enumerable.Range(0, 51);
var shuffledcards = cards.OrderBy(a => Guid.NewGuid());