In the present invention, a method is provided for biasing or controlling the deal of cards, or other indicia, to players of a game. The cards are biased such that each player in the game will receive a hand that is close in ranking to all the other players of the game. Each player of the game is assigned a deviation multiplier selected from a list. Next an initial single hand rank is randomly selected and each player's deviation number is used to identify a range of hand rankings from which each player's hand is selected. If the initial hand ranking is 50 and the average deviation for a player is 2, the player's hand ranking will be in the range of 50.+-.(10.times.deviation multiplier) or 50.+-.(20) which is 30-70. (i.e. 50.+-.20 or 50-20=30 and 50+20=70). Biasing the deal of the cards increases the excitement and competition of the game by allowing all players of the game to have relatively close hand rankings.