Setting the Percentage of Reversed Cards

You can set a percentage of reversals as a default for all decks, or associate a certain percentage of reversals with a particular deck. This can be anything from 0% to 100%. Whenever a percentage of reversals has been set for a particular deck that percentage is applied when you shuffle the deck. It takes precedence over any default percentage you might have established. If a zero percentage of reversals has been specified, no cards are reversed.

You can set the general option by going to the Default Options tab of the Options form. To set the percentage for a specific deck you can go to the Current Deck tab of the Options form. In both cases you will see the percentage, and a pair of pointers which you can use to raise or lower it. The longer you press down on the pointers, the faster you will see the number change, up to the maximum and minimum allowed (100 and 0).

Important: The percentage you set is only a percentage probability - setting a particular percentage does not guarantee that exactly that number of card inversions will be produced. For example, if you set 10% as the figure for reversals then you would see that over many repeated shuffles the number of reversals produced averaged out to 10%. However, you could well find that individual shuffles produce 5% or 15% reversals, say. It would even be possible for a shuffle to produce no reversed cards at all - or produce a relatively high number.

Tip: You can reverse a card, in the sense of reversing the image, by holding down the Shift key and clicking on the card. Repeating the operation will reverse it again, and so on.

Shuffling and Reversed Cards

Note that cards are reversed when they are shuffled, according to the percentage of reversals that you have indicated. This means that reversals are cumulative, which can produce some slightly unexpected results. For example if a card is already reversed from a previous shuffle, and you have set a percentage of reversals of 10%, then there is about a 90% probability that the card will still be reversed after shuffling. This is because it will remain reversed from one shuffle to the next, unless by chance it is reversed again. In that case it will be returned to its upright position. If you want to ensure that all the cards are upright, you should do an ascending or descending sort.