can someone please explain to me how the shuffle at the worlds works? what if a player sucks it up the first 2 days are they cut out?

Pools are set at the beginning, and you play all your rounds in the same pool until the Great Shuffle. That means if you shoot the best score in your pool, you just start on the first card of your pool for the next round. Someone in your division who is in another pool who shoots the exact same score stays in their pool and you two don't shoot together.

During the great shuffle they sort the entire division by scores, and then make pools by score. So the first round on Wednesday will have all the best scores for a division on the same pool.

You stay in the same pool after the shuffle no matter how you shoot. If you hack like you never have before the first two days and get shuffled in to the last pool, you stay there. Even if you make up 20 strokes on the field the first round Wednesday. It's just too hard to shuffle everybody every round, so they do it only once.

The great shuffles happen after both flights have played the same courses. This normally takes at least two days and happens midweek and before the finals.

It is not fair to shuffle the flights unless all the players in the division have played the same courses the same number of times.

Correct. It's not that it's "too hard to shuffle everybody every round", it's that you can only do it when everyone in the division has played the same courses.

Of course Rhett usually plays in Intermediate Grand Masters, so maybe he didn't realize all the issues involved when there are 4 or 5 pools in a division.

does this mean that some players are cut out of the tourney?d

no one gets cut out of the tourny they get shuffled into another pool or stay in the same pool according to how good or bad they played.

What he said.