Sunday, April 10, 2011

2 in 1 Automatic Card Shuffler & Shoe

If you're a card player looking to complicate your life by equipping your home games with some useless gadgets, I have some good news. First of all, you definitely live in the right century. Recreational card players can already "simplify" their home games by dealing the cards out of a Wheel-R-Dealer machine, instead of going through the trouble of removing the cards from the top of the deck by hand. There are also various kinds of card shufflers available and now we have the 2 in 1 Automatic Card Shuffler & Shoe that's basically a dealing shoe that can also shuffle up to two decks, or so they say. I'm sure the inventors of this gadget were inspired by the one2six casino shuffler.

dealing shoe and card shuffler
At the time of this writing online vendors seem to be flooded with these gadgets, so you should not have any trouble finding one. But if you're really interested in buying one you might as well get it from the cheapest source, which is Amazon.com.

Since I don't really have anything good to say about this piece of equipment I'll just tell you what's wrong with it.

The main flaw is that this is not really a shuffler. A true shuffler is supposed to randomize the deck so that the new sequence of cards bears no resemblance to the initial sequence, But this shuffler basically performs the equivalent of a single riffle shuffle, and a very poor one, with large clumps of cards being carried from the previous arrangement. No self respecting card player should ever agree to play a single round, if a shuffle is so poorly executed.

I went through the trouble of doing a few test shuffles and the results were always more or less the same. Below is a photograph of a spread that came out of the shuffler. The cards were initially in numerical order, then the deck was split in two and one of the halves was reversed, so that I can illustrate the point, clearly. It is quite obvious that the two visible suits are still in numerical order, except that there are clumps of cards from the other pile in between. If casinos did their shuffle that what they'd long be out of biz. And of one doesn't want to get screwed playing cards, one thing to do is to copy what casinos do.

card shuffler
Below is a video recording of the test shuffle, using a single deck. The shuffler is supposed to be able to handle up to two decks, but to be perfectly honest I didn't feel like going through the trouble of mixing two deck of cards together, just to see what results I'd get. The shuffler performs a clumpy single riffle shuffle and I know what the results of that are, without even doing any testing. But I still recorded the video just to show the handling of the machine.

video
http://www.blogger.com/video-play.mp4?contentId=64bb4edb8c610565&type=video%2Fmp4

There are some other flaws, but I really don't see any point going into details. My review of this equipment is that it's totally useless. It's a toy, and not even a very good one.

Stephen Hawking once said that we [i.e. us humans] should be a two planet species; "mankind should colonize other planets to survive," says he. If one looks at how humans are raping this planet and depleting all available natural resources, to make stupid stuff no one really needs, one can see his point. We live in the era of hyper-consumerism and at the rate we're going this planet will become one large junkyard for 2 in 1 Automatic Card Shufflers and similar useless gadgets.

So, is this thing good for anything? In my case, yes. I purchased this gadget for one specific purpose, to take a picture and make a blog post. And since that's exactly what I did, it served its purpose. Now it's back in its box and I'm trying to figure out where it will take up the least amount of space.

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