[AmericanAirlines]

Hi Max,
Well here's what I noticed as a 21 dealer, not poker.

The shufflers that are not continuous, nobody cares one way or the other to much as an average player. Mgmt and players who think they have an edge (at 21) like them because they are faster, despite some players belief these things can somehow stack the deck.

With continuous shufflers, well it means Card Counting is completely invalidated. The only strategy against a deck that's always shuffled is basic strategy.

But, at least at Circus Circus mgmt. tried them and concluded the continuous shufflers were costing them money. I've heard some rumblings that the early ones did have some sort of exploitable shortcoming. But I tend to think that even a continuous shuffler without a defect, assuming a truly random shuffle, will tend to reduce variance over a hand shuffled deck... so players won't bust out as often... so you still might see where your cashflow as a casino, becomes less per unit time. Not sure on that though. Just a thought.

Bottom line, the casinos are buying them, that's all that counts, no?

But, since they don't exactly whereout every day, I suppose there's a saturation point in terms of revenues to Shufflemaster.... so your stock play probably depends more on whether market saturation has been reached or not.

Sincerely,
AA
AA