ItsOverJonny wondered in comment below whether or not the new ShuffleTech noise machines auto-shufflers actually kept a count of the cards being riffled … I wasn\’t sure (kinda assumed they did), so, because apparently this is what I like to do at 6:30 am on Saturday night/Sunday morn, I wrote to the folks at ShuffleTech (which happens to be based in the small village outside of Chicago where I was born) and they responded:
Dear Dan,
I\’m happy to answer this or any other question, particularly for anybody from Shuffle Tech\’s home town!
The ST-1000 does not count cards. Most of the machines that do in the casinos are also scanning the faces of each card, which enables those machines to not only count but also identify any missing card. You can understand how that could be abused in a private, unregulated environment: a clever programmer could reprogram the machine to identify the location of any particular card in a deck, and in the case of the casino machines (which function differently than Shuffle Tech) place certain cards in a certain position in the deck.
I hope this answer the question, and our reason for avoiding any mechanism or feature that could potentially be abused.
Best regards,
Rick Schultz
