Explain a Cube Draft to me

I'm finding this thread VERY interesting.

Now let me talk about shuffling. Hand over hand shuffling doesn't randomise and I read somewhere that a bridge riffle shuffle at least 6 times, with middle third removed and put on the top before bridging again, is the best randomiser. Others talk about 8 piles and dealing into piles. Shuffling hand over hand each pile and then slowly reforming the deck.

In tournament play this would all seem to be open to a lot of abuse. Is there a STANDARD way of shuffling?

For "serious" shuffling I always do the 8 piles. That seemed to be the standard back when I was going to MTG tournaments 10-15 years ago. I had heard that some mega card counting nerds were cheating the system with that though so it may have fallen out of favor. I'd say that if you're not worried about card counting mega nerds, the piles works great. Especially if you add cards to the piles in a non-uniform ratio/rate and just do it kinda randomly.

Okay, Booster vs. Rochester vs. Winston:

Winston is two-player only, so that's the niche for that. Rochester? No one Rochesters anymore. But basically, Rochester vs. Booster is a question of perfect vs. hidden information and which of the two you prefer. There is also more hate-drafting in Rochester because you know what people are playing, which leads to weaker decks, which leads to less fun. Really, I can imagine no circumstance in which I'd ever play Rochester, it seems like one of those things for the people who are obsessed with the "how can we maximize the degree to which skill matters" question.

Shuffling:

"Pile shuffling" is *not* random. You can pretty easily stack your deck so that a pile shuffle will stack it exactly how you want it. In a tournament, if your opponent *only* pile-shuffles, you can make a judge tell your opponent to do a real shuffle as well. In a tournament you are also always allowed to shuffle your opponent's deck in any way you'd like without damaging the cards.

Straight-up riffle shuffling bends the crap out of cards.

By far the most common shuffling method in tournaments is called either the "mash" or "side" shuffle, I'm never clear on the terminology. This shuffle basically only exists in Magic, because it's impossible to do without sleeves and actually utilizes the sleeves (which make other kinds of shuffling harder). Basically you cut your deck in half, hold one half in each hand and mash them into each other from the side. You need to hold the cards loosely so that you're not jamming them into each other, but letting them easily glide in between each other. If you get a brand new pack of ultra pros with non-glossy backs, it feels sooooo natural, they slide super-duper easy.

After each side shuffle you cut out the middle and put it on top like ThirstyMan described, so basically it's like a riffle shuffle that doesn't bend the cards and utilizes the extra space in between each card created by the edges of the sleeves. Side shuffling is one of the main reasons I use sleeves even with inexpensive cards.

Shuffling more than 80 cards this way, though, is a huge pain in the ass. Shuffling a Cube in general is a huge pain in the ass, usually takes me an hour to shuffle my 720-card cube satisfactorily (that is not the case for block Cubes divided by C/U/R, don't worry).

EDIT: If you want to see this process, google "Saito shuffle" and watch some 30 second youtube videos.

Also, I should've added that most people do both side shuffling AND pile shuffling. While pile shuffling is NOT random, it does break up stuff that was together and "shuffles" in a very different way from side shuffling, so they supplement each other.