Board Game Arena

IT seems to me that I see a lot more dealer J's then seems statistically accurate? I had one game J 6 of the first 7 and 9 of the 13 hands dealt. Could be confirmation bias but see them a lot.

You can try sampling randomly extracted games to prove your claim.
I'd say at least 1000 tables are required to guarantee the margin of error less than 3%.

Confirmation bias is a big part of it for sure.

But maybe more importantly for euchre in particular, is that it really is muuuuuuch more common than you prob feels it should be.

For starters, there's only 6 cards in each suit, so that's a 1/6 chance each draw. That's already just quite high, esp if you play lots of card games (which mostly have larger decks),
Especially as outliers, like it happening several times per game/in a row get exponentially[*] more common as the initial chance goes up. And it's mostly those outliers that trigger your confirmation bias in the first place.


But it's Euchre specifically that makes it worse even.
Whenever the Jack is drawn up, it's not just a jack, it's (automatically) the jack of trumps. And even though rationally, you know there's 0 coincidence there, as the drawing of that card decided the trump suit in the first place. Gut feeling isn't rational, so that still makes it feel like a more significant and notable event.

That effect is amplified even more by the fact it's impossible the second highest trump to be drawn up. So not only do have a 1/6 chance to draw 1 of 7 cards. Dawing Jacks give the dealer a hugely disproportionate advantage relative to even the next best draw (A), which itself is only marginally better than a K.

TL;DR All in all, Euchre throws off your intuition in several ways, to make drawing Js feel way more "special". Despite already being surprisingly common.