Automatic Shufflers

[DeliciousBass]

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I...do not wear a tinfoil hat

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If you did, would you recommend Reynold's Wrap or the store brand?

I made mine out of the store's aluminium foil and I don't think it's as effective as it could have been had I used a better quality brand.

I need a response within the next thirteen minutes, forty-two seconds...please hurry.

[MrDannimal]

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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.

[Hatless]

When I am plaing live, and one of the shufflers is broken, the people at the table usually complain more than the dealers. I have had people get up from a table just to go to another table with a shufflemaster. I have never heard someone who didn't want to play more hands per hour.

[Ioz]

The reason any company leases anything instead of buying it is for upkeep. The casino doesn't have to worry about repair costs, or repair issues.
If the machine breaks, the company that leases it to them is responsible to fix it, or replace it.
It is for ease of service. Nothing more, nothing less.

[MrDannimal]

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When I am plaing live, and one of the shufflers is broken, the people at the table usually complain more than the dealers. I have had people get up from a table just to go to another table with a shufflemaster. I have never heard someone who didn't want to play more hands per hour.

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I don't disagree. But it's often the case (at least in the example Greektown) that you can't easily move tables (bad floor, no seats...). I was giving a reason why the casino would use machines on time-charge games that don't generate more profit from more hands/hr.

[SenorBeef]

So you're saying that they use the rigged shuffling machines on time-charge tables, implying that therefore they can't be used for rake-maxing ... then what's their motivation?

If they deal a lot of AA vs KK, people are going to go broke faster. Broke faster = less time charges collected.

Just consider the logistics of this conspiracy.

First, someone has to design a very sophisticated machine that can read the cards (let's call it optical recognition because if you RFID tag the cards you introduce an entirely new conspiracy and expense with these tagged decks), be able to manipulate them in a precise order, be sophisticated enough to know how to rig the deck, but in a non-obvious way, and somehow be able to predict where the dealer is going to cut.

In addition, no one in the manufacturing or deployment of these things blows any whistles, no one who runs the poker rooms notices the dramatic change overall in the dealing (or maybe they're in on it, making the conspiracies huge), and no gaming board, which have probably extensively tested the machine, found anything wrong.

All of this risk for the benefit of..... having people go bust faster and losing money?

[kiwi]

I always understood they were there to protect the dealers.

Last night I told the dealer to stfu and deal.

The automatic shuffler took me out to the car park and kicked me in the nuts, then seared my retina with it's laser. As I dropped to my knees in agony, it prised open my rectum and inserted a deck of cards in there, saying "you should have listened to Photoc, [censored]"

I wish I had.

[a1WDC182]

Just consider the logistics of this conspiracy.



lol

[QuadsOverQuads]

(1) The dealer cuts the deck after it comes out of the shuffler, so it is impossible for the shuffler to predetermine who gets what cards.

(2) The shuffler counts down the deck during every shuffle. This means that the dealer doesn't have to rely on periodic manual stub-counts, and that any attempts at hold-outs will be caught as soon as they occur. This significantly improves the security of the game.

(3) Shufflers remove an unnecessary delay from the game, which means that everyone gets to spend more of their live time actually playing poker. This is a good for the house, good for the players and good for the dealers. Win-win-win.


q/q

[JJNJustin]

There are five B&M casinos in my area. Greektown, Motor City, Windsor, Sarnia, and Mt. Pleasant. I know nothing about Sarnia.

Greektown has 18-20 tables, all of which are NL with timed drag except for 1-2 $3-6 limit games which have rake.

Motor City is the same, except for a few more limit games, maybe 4-5.

Windsor is the same as Greektown.

Mt. Pleasant is the only casino that the majority of the games are raked limit games. They usually have only 1-2 tables of timed NL games. This is the only casino of all of them that does not use automatic shufflers at all. You would think they stand to profit the most, yet the others stand to profit the least.

Isnt is strange that the games in Downtown Detroit are primarily no-limit, yet 2 1/2 hours north there is a huge divergence in popularity towards limit games? On the weekends they even spread limit O8B and 7-stud.

One possible explanation is that Mt. Pleasant dealers are non-unionized, and hence are much quicker than the union dealers downtown, who are incredibly slow. Also, Mt. Pleasant is an Indian casino, and the regulations may be less stringent. Automatic shufflers may not increase the profits in Mt. Pleasant by as much, seeing as the dealers are already fast. The casinos downtown may try to "push" NL games because they make the maximum hourly profit, despite having slow union dealers which they can do nothing about.

But then why do they bother to lease shufflers? Strictly for player contentment and security reasons? This is entirely reasonable, but also very expensive. I guess this is why the rake is very high here in Detroit.

-J