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.
By Patrick T. Mulry Special Contributor to Pokerati.com
I received one of the first production models of the new ShuffleTech shuffler a couple of weeks ago. I loaned them the use of one of our poker tables for the WSOP Gaming Life Expo, so that put me near the top of the list for production models. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a distributor for ShuffleTech. You can be the judge about whether this is a fair review or not, but I’ll try not to pull any punches.
I’m attaching a photos that I shot with my cell phone camera that shows the shuffler installed in one of my poker tables. As you can see, it is mounted with a flush mount kit so that the top of the shuffler is flush with the top of the felt. The shuffler can also be operated as a stand-alone unit on a table. In that case, you can choose to either insert and remove the cards from the top of the unit, or you can flip a switch and the cards will eject out the side of the unit.
Don’t ask me why, but I am … some dude (at the Hard Rock, quasi-coincidentally) was talking just the other day about the new ShuffleTech machines — the in-table ShuffleMaster knock-off. I don’t know the details, but apparently ShuffleMaster has quite the grip on the automatic poker-table shuffler market. You’ve probably noticed these popping up (literally) on more and more tables these days, and they are all made by the same company. However, you’re kinda shit-outta-luck if you want one for your home/underground game … you can find the tables with the ShuffleMasters pre-installed, however you are screwed because they have to do the maintenance (or something like that).
Anyhow, that’s the half-story I know about this company that seems to be on the forefront of deeply vested in gambling technology. (One of their other products I just saw at Caesar’s last week was a cardless table-blackjack game featuring a video image of a dealer.)
But now ShuffleTech is in the picture, too — not dealing to casinos, but to home users. While I want to say, “Awesome!” … I gotta say, looking at their shufflers makes me think of the first laptops, when they were the size of suitcases. But still, as archaic as their version (which somehow steers clear of patent protections) seems, I can’t see how these won’t become more and more standard in the future … and once we get some robots that can actually pitch the cards … watch out dealers:
(But for now, could you imagine being deep in the tank when the next deck is being set rumble rumble?)
