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I appreciate all of your responses. I wasnt expecting too much in the way of affirmation, and that's good. Obviously I am not totally convinced of my own speculation about this or I wouldnt play poker 5 days a week at the Detroit casinos. I get hypomanic often and when I do sometimes mild paranoia or suspiciousness developes, in this case about automatic shufflers. Nevertheless, here are some things that still bother me:
1) Greektown Casino in Detroit has 18 tables, 90% of which at any given time are spreading a timed collection NL game. Since dealing extra hands per hour generates them no extra income with this time collection, why do they generously pay the monthly leasing for shufflers on each and every one of their tables?
2)Why is the dealer only allowed to cut once, yet not do anything else to the deck?
3)Why do these devices have infrared lasers installed in them, yet reportedly are not capable of reading the cards?
4)Why are these devices so expensive to purchase that most casinos lease them? The purchase price is listed as $14,000 on the website,
www.shufflemaster.com. Is the machinery required just to produce a random shuffle so sophisticated as to cost this much?
-J
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1) The dealers all claim that the wear and tear on their hands/wrists is much less on tables with shufflers than without. I sat at Greektown for several hours recently with a broken shuffler, and every dealer mentioned it. They pay the lease because of the other benefits. More hands/hr doesn't generate more rake, but it does generate happier players. Who then decide not to go to MCC.
2) The more a dealer is allowed to fiddle with the deck, the more chances they have to rig it.
3) The laser is used to count the number of cards and their movement, not what the card is. Just like any home security system can't tell you WHO tripped the sensor, just that it WAS tripped.
4) Shufflemaster has a vested interest in leasing the machines instead of selling them. That is, continued income at a known and consistant level. Rather than hoping new machines get bought at a certain rate, they know there's $X coming in each month from leases.