[dahart]

I wonder if this is related -- the description immediately made me think of the "avalanche" effect in hash functions. A hash function avalanches if a single bit change in the input produces a wildly different output. So avalanche would be the exact opposite of the funneling effect of this card counting trick. In hash functions, the funneling effect or "trap card" would be a sign that your counting function isn't good enough. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalanche_effect)

Pretty sure I first heard about avalanching from Bob Jenkins' hash functions. (http://burtleburtle.net/bob/hash/doobs.html)

[akrasuski1]

It's really unrelated - it's more about the hash domain being rather small, i.e. 52. I would think that if you substitute the counting (go to card N+value) to proper hashing (go to card md5(value)%52) you would get the same, if not stronger, result.