SHUFFLE TECH News (5 Viewers)

I still haven't seen a shipping notification from Shuffle Tech... (Feb 6 order) and I haven't had an email response since Feb 12. I've sent an email Mar 3 and Mar 8 without responses. 5 weeks now since order date... :(

Things aren't looking great. Sucks I bought a cart and flush mount before actually getting the thing. Guess I put too much trust in them to deliver...

Sad, the site still shows it's in stock and gives you no warning that it won't ship immediately. Really poor business practice.
 
I had some problems with them also when I sent one for repair. Taking a lot longer than they promised. Promising ship date and a week later nothing. Called and still hadn’t been shipped. It was frustrating. They finally shipped though. I’d try calling them.
 
I've had the same experience multiple times. I had some warranty work done that I had to email them multiple times spanning 1 year before getting a response. I think I emailed at 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, and then i did a hail Mary at 1 year and they responded and took care of it.

Grant
 
I just had a dealing with them. I almost got the impression that this is a side gig or part time. I really had to pester them. In the end all worked out.
 
While they're probably as good as your average non chipper home game player's shuffling ability, the results I've seen from the shuffle tech machines do not produce a truly randomized deck with only one pass through the machine. The deck is exploitable to someone paying close enough attention. Not remarkably so, but enough that I would run each deck through twice if Phil Ivey or Chris Ferguson were at the table.
 
Do you keep it next to the table?

I keep it next to the dealer, it does take up seat 10 but if you only have 9 players it is perfect. if a 10th comes we just roll it behind the dealer. While that is not perfect I'll be honest I like my table and I am just hesitant to cut into it and mess it up.

260829


@namsupak do you know the name of the ikea cart?

It is called the MICKE, at this time it is like $60. If you do decide to cut into it. Like with all IKEA stuff the top is not solid so it take a little bit of work around with a jigsaw to get a 45 degree angle cut in the top to be able to use the flush mount kit. Here is the pic of what the cross section of the top actually is. I also picked up a piece of black scrap form the IKEA as is that I bought in case I needed to use that, but then I would have had to drill into it and add brackets to it in order to fasten to the sides and the flimsy back of the cart. Ultimately I used the included top piece as it was already set with those funky ikea fasteners.

260830
 
Looks Great! any issues with noise now that it's in a contained case? Any ventilation needed?
 
While they're probably as good as your average non chipper home game player's shuffling ability, the results I've seen from the shuffle tech machines do not produce a truly randomized deck with only one pass through the machine. The deck is exploitable to someone paying close enough attention. Not remarkably so, but enough that I would run each deck through twice if Phil Ivey or Chris Ferguson were at the table.
Curious. Can you explain how?
 
Curious. Can you explain how?

If you're really interested, I wrote a paper in grad school about deck shuffling as it relates to card randomization (see attachment). One way to measure a deck's randomness is to count the number of rising sequences in the deck. If you were to place the cards in order, and numbered them 1 through 52, then riffle shuffled the deck one time and checked the order of the cards, you might find that they are ordered something like this:

27 28 29 1 2 30 31 3 4 32 5 33 6
34 7 35 8 36 9 37 10 38 11 39 12 13
14
40 15 41 16 17 42 43 18 44 19 20 45
46 47 48 49 21 50 51 22 23 24 25 52 26

In the above deck, you can clearly see the two "rising sequences" with the first starting at 27,28,29 and going up to 52 and the second starting at 1,2 and going up through 26. This deck would obviously be extremely exploitable as it's only been shuffled once, but it's helpful for understanding how randomness manifests itself in a deck. The paper I wrote below goes into greater detail, with plotted distributions and a fair bit of coding, about the rising sequence distributions in randomized decks. In short, if you were to take 10,000 completely randomized decks, and counted the number of rising sequences found in each deck, you would find that there were 26.5 rising sequences on average, with a standard deviation of 2.1.

In the 'Shuffle Tech Shuffler' video below where they demo the machine and show the deck after it has been shuffled (starting at 2:00), pay attention to the distribution of the clubs. You'll notice that the deck has 6c7c out front, then you don't see another club until the back half of the deck where you find a few more sequences (TcQc, 4c5c, 8c9c), and that's just from what we can see. You'll also notice the clustering of other suits as he passes through the deck. There are quite a few cards that we can't see as he's just quickly running through the deck though. He seems to think the results are good here and is showing the "randomized" deck that it produced, but someone knowing what to pay attention to could take advantage of this shuffle. Magicians use rising sequences to their advantage when performing card tricks.

You wouldn't be able to gain a huge edge, but you could gain a measurable one. Imagine if you knew that a deck was perfectly ordered prior to the shuffle, and you knew the shuffle resulted in chunked distributions like you see in this video. You could exploit the deck by knowing that straight draws and flush draws would come in at a higher frequency than they would if the deck were in truly random order. Two hearts on the flop would yield a higher probability of being followed by third heart in a deck with too few rising sequences than they would in a deck with 26 rising sequences.

 

Attachments

  • Card Shuffling Optimality - Trail.pdf
    208 KB · Views: 219
I emailed Shuffle Tech last night to see if I could get a response and he actually got back to me within just a few hours. I asked about current stock and expectations of when I could receive one by.

I said:
Hello, I am interested in purchasing the ST-1000 shuffler and was wondering if you have any in stock and if so, how soon it would be shipped. I've read a lot of reviews stating that people are placing orders and not getting any shufflers or responses from you, so I'm wanting to ensure that you are still making these and shipping out orders before I buy.

Thank you,
Travis

Shuffle Master said:
We are shipping backorders right now, but we are caught up through January, and we are filling orders based on order date. If you placed an order now, it would probably not be shipped until next month. If you wanted to wait, it would be much quicker (assuming you placed your order in mid- to late-April.) Of course, if you place an order now, you do not need to pay, and we wouldn’t charge you until we’re ready to ship.
 
I owned one for 24 hours several years ago. It was intolerably loud. My players laughed at me the first time I ran a deck through it. eBayed it the next day.
 
Here is a screen shot from my paper which shows the distribution of rising sequences after n shuffles of a deck. The blue curve represents the distribution from completely random decks.

View attachment 261009
Curious, if you just hit the 7 shuffle button vs the 3 wouldn’t that remove most rising sequences?

Even better flip the switch to FMK so all cards stay in the top and when finished just cycle it again. ?
 
Curious, if you just hit the 7 shuffle button vs the 3 wouldn’t that remove most rising sequences?

Even better flip the switch to FMK so all cards stay in the top and when finished just cycle it again. ?

I don't own one, I've only seen a few videos like the one above on YouTube. I didn't realize there was an option for different shuffle counts. If the video above is using just 3 shuffles and there is an option for 7, then yes that *should* solve the problem I had identified.
 
Couldn’t this be solved by a quick wash of the deck before putting in the shuffler?

Yes, or at least with a thorough wash. Which is why card rooms only shuffle 3 times since they wash the cards too. Normally, 3 shuffles by themselves doesn't do much in the way of randomizing a deck. But a thorough wash helps a lot. Much more than a rifle shuffle in fact. I rarely see players washing the deck before dealing in home games though.
 
Is this, and all of the above, based on a new deck with all the cards in order?

Not necessarily. It is with respect to the current ordering of a deck before it gets shuffled. A new ordered deck just makes for a simple example that's easier to follow. But any deck can be exploited.

For example, let's say a hand plays out where player 1 has JJ and player 2 has 88. The board comes out 358J8. Everyone else folded and all their cards are in the muck along with the burns. The dealer places the winning hand up top with the board, pushing up the made hand (8888J), then grabs the JJ and places them on top of the stub/muck. Then he pushes the pot, scoops up the board and 88 and places them on top of the stub as well (this is all pretty standard). Now he grabs and squares up the deck which has three Js and 4 8s in the top 9 cards and performs 3 riffle shuffles and has the player to his right cut the deck, then deals the next hand. While the location of the cluster of Js and 8s might be somewhat random (they could be at the top, middle, bottom, etc. depending on the cut and shuffle), their ordering in the deck is less so. If the flop on the next hand happens to have a J and an 8 on it, there's a much higher probability that another J or 8 are likely to show up on the turn and/or river than there would be in an otherwise truly random deck.

It's funny because we often laugh at players who say superstitious things like "4s are running hot right now", but depending on the circumstances of how the deck is being shuffled between hands, they could actually be justified in their seemingly foolish beliefs.
 
Sorry for derailing this. Maybe we should move the randomness in shuffling topic to another thread? I was just expressing my concerns with the shuffle tech after watching some shuffled deck results on YouTube. But that's easy to fix by either washing the cards before putting them in or shuffling them 7 times.
 
I've had the same experience multiple times. I had some warranty work done that I had to email them multiple times spanning 1 year before getting a response. I think I emailed at 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, and then i did a hail Mary at 1 year and they responded and took care of it.

Grant

The company has had my shuffler for a month now. I've been emailing them every few days with no response.

Finally, today I went onto their website and filled out a comment form and received a response.

Evidently, my shuffler is too old to repair (2009) - they don't have parts for it. (It jams alot and one of the hinges on the top door snapped). Rick advised they may have some type of 'workaround' or offer me a credit towards a new unit.

WTF? Shouldn't they have advised me of this BEFORE I sent it back!?!

What's the over/under on actually getting something back from this company? A few months to a year?
 
The company has had my shuffler for a month now. I've been emailing them every few days with no response.

Finally, today I went onto their website and filled out a comment form and received a response.

Evidently, my shuffler is too old to repair (2009) - they don't have parts for it. (It jams alot and one of the hinges on the top door snapped). Rick advised they may have some type of 'workaround' or offer me a credit towards a new unit.

WTF? Shouldn't they have advised me of this BEFORE I sent it back!?!

What's the over/under on actually getting something back from this company? A few months to a year?

They've given people good credits toward a new one before. He's slow but eventually does follow up.
 

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