Analysis of casino shelf shuffling machines (2011)

by ColinWright • 9 years ago

46 27 9 years ago

dghughes4• 9 years ago

I bet most people are unaware how expensive card shufflers are $20,000 US is typical. But really leasing shufflers is far more common.

One company, Shufflemaster (SHFL), had a monopoly on the market. But Bally bought SHFL and then Scientific Games bought Bally.

I've heard the patent (or whatever it is) SHFL has expires very soon. There may be a rush of new companies trying to get in on this expensive market.

Other ridiculously expensive casino equipment is a small mirror/prism. It's affixed to a card table in front of the dealer. Two cards are inserted face down but the prism reflect back the card number and suit so the dealer can see it. This small simple thing is only leased costing $100 per table per month.

I'm a recently suddenly out of work slot tech forgive my reminiscing.

Edit: table not tanke

trothamel• 9 years ago

What's the mirror/prism for? I'm assuming this is a legit game - is it just to make games of Blackjack go faster?

sanswork2• 9 years ago

So they can check if they have blackjack without flipping the cards.

lando2319• 9 years ago

the old way of doing it involved cupping your hand around the card and trying to look at the card discretely. The issue is someone could be standing behind you and get a glimpse.

Not to mention with the old method the dealer would actually see their hole card. Let's say the dealer shows a 10, then when they check, they see they have another 10 as their hole card (face down). The dealer could intentionally or unintentionally give away what their card is, causing someone who normally wouldn't hit on, let's say 17, to take a hit, since the dealer would beat them anyways.

With these little windows, the dealer only see IF they have a blackjack, not the actual card itself.

This happens because the markings for 10s (10, J, Q, K) are all offset slightly to the right. Then the Ace is offset slightly up (the dealer turns it before sliding it into the window).

I use to be a casino dealer.

(edit: typo)

ryandrake3• 9 years ago

I built myself a somewhat fancy card table a couple of years back, and wanted to add an authentic built-in casino-style shuffler for it, and was blown away by how much these things go for. Additionally, it is very difficult to buy them second-hand: I would guess Shufflemaster may have some agreement with their customers that limits their availability in the after-market. The few you can actually find on eBay still go for multiple thousands of dollars! I chose to go without and just shuffle the old fashioned way.

The market for a reasonably priced (under $500) in-table shuffler is probably very niche, but it exists and is an opportunity. As far as I'm aware there is only one other company with a decent one, and I won't link to them because of their extremely poor (borderline scammy) service. If you're a poker table builder though you've heard of the company and probably read the horror stories in the forums. Ripe for 'disruption'.

dghughes4• 9 years ago

You find it interesting that Shufflemaster iDeal shufflers have a camera in them that reads each card that goes by it and stores that card in memory. You tune a specific manufacturer style of cards since they all are slightly different.

So if a player later disputes and says he swears he had an Ace of spades the pit boss looks back in the shuffler history to see that hand given to that player did not have an Ace of spades it was a 4 of spades.

stinos• 9 years ago

slot tech

Do you mean the 'digital' ones i.e. the games with 3 or 4 3x3 rasters where one has to place 3x1 lines and try to match the fruits and bells and whatnot? If so could you share some knowledge on how the randomization on these things work? When I play these I can't help but wonder how this works. I'm fairly sure it's not 100% work of a random generator but rather finely tuned to give enough so the player comes back, but not too much. And at the same times there's a weight assigned to certain piecs and combinations thereof. And possibly there's even some rules like 'max number of points per x games can be no more then y' etc. All in all, it feels pretty complicated but I might be completely wrong.

joezydeco• 9 years ago

The magic is US Patent 4,484,419. Known in the industry as the "Telnaes" patent after it's inventor.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US4448419A

This invention is where slots migrated from physical reels to virtual ones. A reel could now have thousands of "stops" compared to 10 or 20 on the older machines. The physical reels were now driven by stepper motors to show the landing position of that virtual reel. Having virtual reels with many more stops also meant the jackpots could be a lot higher than the typical 1-in-20^3 possibility of a physical reel group.

After some time, it was realized that the careful design of these virtual reels is where the slot designer can create many many "oh-so-close" combinations of the physical symbols without making the player land any closer to the jackpot than normal. And that semi-positive reinforcement draws the player in to play more.

dghughes4• 9 years ago

Only digital yes although some have physical reels but the actual reels are just for show they have no actual effect even if you move them (it will show reel tilt).

The lower the award the more symbols are on a reel, there are also virtual stops since a reel would need to have a diameter of 2 metres to fit them all on. Blank spaces are also stops. There is only one top award symbol on each reel.

Some slots alter the odds the higher you bet but those are not really common or at least we never had such slots.

I wasn't involved in that much detail to know how each slot machine OS worked other than get the machine working so it can be played. But generally speaking there are multiple PRNGs on old terminals new HD/CF based slots would have similar in software. Nothing is truly random of course, hence the pseudo part, due to limitations of the hardware and the crystal oscillators chips or software used to generate random numbers.

It's random enough although it very common to see a hold of over 100% and way under the optioned in percentage. Usually the higher the denom the higher the payback to the player e.g. 1 cent maybe 80% and $1 95% and $5 may be 98% but those are over one or ten million spins not per player.

Then add in progressives which add to the percentage so a 1 cent progressive at 80% + maybe 5% for the progressive math makes 85% payback. Recently random progressives that award for no reason i.e. you don't need the top five symbols at max bet to win. Some progressive award within a range starts/resets at say $500 won't go over $1000 so if it's $999 it will go soon (people fight over them at that point).

This doesn't include server based slots where the theme (the game e.g. Miss Kitty, Joe's Yard Games, Lobstermania) itself can be changed or the percentage can be altered by hour, by day by player. We never used server based slots but all casinos use a casino management system (CMS) backend to track players and awards points if they have a card and I mean each spin each bet per second every second all is captured. Award points for example may be 40:1 dollars:points it's ridiculously bad you end up paying $400 for a $10 t-shirt in the gift shop.

You may find a Paytable and Reel PAR Sheet interesting https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&biw=1920&bih=1050&sit...:

Delphi has a slot tech forum too. Randy Fromm is another big name he runs Slot Tech Magazine. Randy may even read HN, Mr Fromm are you there?

The industry is amazing right now so many acquisitions. Former slot giant IGT (USA) a huge company was bought by Spielo (Canada) but Spielo was bought by Atronic and Atronic (Monaco) was bought by LottoMatica (Italy). Bally bought Shufflemaster and Scientific Games bought Bally.

rjett• 9 years ago

One of the most recent Planet Money episodes, #773: Slot Flaws Scofflaws, explores slot machine design, to some extent. It's a fun listen.

http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money

jedberg2• 9 years ago

I never play on a table with an auto shuffler. As a player, the house already has an advantage over you. The auto shuffler means the house always has the same advantage on every hand.

At least with a hand shuffled deck, most humans can't get a perfect shuffle, so the odds of any one hand shift slightly back and forth. If you're good at counting cards, you can find the spots where it is slightly in your favor and bet bigger.

At least, it's more fun for me, because I win a little bit more and also get the fun of practicing counting cards.

It's hard to find the hand shuffled decks though -- they pretty much only have them on high stakes games ($25/hand and up).

kirykl• 9 years ago

Auto shufflers are all about dealing speed. Hand shuffle at high stakes is about service. It isn't about increasing house edge. In fact house edge will fluctuate so little that when it occurs and you make a max bet you'll be spotted and stopped.

influx• 9 years ago

Don't the hand shuffled games modify the payout for blackjack making counting unprofitable?

jbigelow76• 9 years ago

Lots of casinos are going to 6/5 payouts instead of 3/2, as well as various other restrictions on doubling down or splitting etc, regardless of shuffle method primarily because most tourists don't know any better that they are playing at a higher disadvantage than before, squeezing the margin on card counters is a side benefit.

downandout2• 9 years ago

The condition you're referring to only occurs on one specific type of shuffler, called a CSM (continuous shuffler machine). These are the kind where the dealer feeds previously discarded cards back into the machine every hand or two, and there is never any pause in the game. CSM's are less common than traditional shuffler machines, where two decks/shoes are used, and one is being shuffled while the other is being played with. Traditional shuffler machines have no bearing on your ability to count cards, as the game is played out exactly as it would be if the dealer were shuffling.

Also, advantage players have found flaws that make certain models of shuffle machines vulnerable to attack. Here's a fascinating example of this from the world's best known advatange player, James Grosjean:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/magazine/how-advantage...

jedberg2• 9 years ago

You're right, the CSM is terrible and is what I was actually referring to. However, I will still try to avoid the traditional machine shufflers since they still get more random shuffles than a hand shuffle which rarely has more than 3 or 4 riffles.

Analysis of casino shelf shuffling machines (2011)

Related Stories