What a recipe for disaster!! Casino too cheap to pay an extra or "break" dealer to shuffle their own cards while the game is being run by the usual personnel, stupid enough to sign a deal where they not only don't "have to" check the decks, but aren't allowed to do so -- and so they're totally dependent on the manufacturer to get it right (and their own people to bring in the shuffled cards and NOT to bring in the wrong box of cards) - not too mention the possibility of the wrong box getting shipped or something else, which may be the source of the problem of un-shuffled cards showing up.
If they spread and check the cards at games where they DO shuffle themselves, why would it become acceptable practice to skip that step if the cards are pre-shuffled??? In the games where they shuffle themselves, they certainly don't rely on the manufacturer to have 52 perfect cards to make up the correct deck -- they check to see if there are 52 different ones, and check for marks on the backs.
And what about those automatic / continuous shuffling machines that are found at blackjack tables -- why not use those if all the other arguments don't carry enough weight?
If players are allowed to crease the cards, that's fine (I guess -- although I don't see the importance of that, and it's certainly not allowed at blackjack or poker -- I know, those games re-use the cards -- but so could baccarat if they didn't allow creasing). But if they allow the crasing, that certainly demands new cards every shoe, but why not shuffle themselves -- the 30 minutes of down-time? They don't mind that at the blackjack table when they use an eight-deck shoe -- and blackjack is a much faster game, so they are missing a lot more hands (although possibly not a lot more action, as baccarat tends to be higher-stakes -- but not so much for mini-baccarat, so...).
The only difference is opening the boxes for new cards, while blackjack already has the cards out of the boxes -- but even that's not true when they bring in new cards, usually once a shift or once a day at most casinos I've visited.
I can't think of a single excuse for this practice, and wonder if the liability of the casino is completely assumed by the manufacturer, no matter what the contract says, when a casino certainly has partial responsibility, not only for running the game, but also for making decisions as to who their suppliers are, the quality of the products and services they receive, etc. If I were the manufacturer, I'd do like others who produce products on which people rely -- they just say, if our product is defective, we'll replace it --- and they DO NOT take responsibility for the consequential disasters if they occur (such as losing important work because a backup disk is defective, for example).
--Barry Glazer
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3a. Unshuffled cards cost Golden Nugget millions -- I don't
get itAccording to an article in today's paper, Golden Nugget in
Atlantic City ordered a preshuffled bunch of cards to be
used at baccarat, which I assume would be something like 8
or more decks, since that is normally used for that
game. Players noticed the same order of cards coming
out over and over and started betting high and then won 1.5
million. Now the casino doesn't want to pay them and
they are suing, and the casino is suing Gemaco, the people
who made the cards.This makes no sense to me. First, why would a casino
order a preshuffled deck from somewhere else? They
would have to shuffle the deck(s) again anyway after
discarding. Secondly, whenever I've seen new decks
brought into a game, the casino always spreads the decks and
then checks them for manufacturing errors. Whether
deck or decks were supposedly preshuffled or not, wouldn't
the casino need to check them for manufacturing defects and
thus see they weren't shuffled? Wouldn't the casino
want to reshuffle even supposedly preshuffled decks?
And why have them preshuffled anyway, for a onetime bonus of
no shuffling...wouldn't you want to check the decks for
defects, make sure the right number of cards were there, and
then reshuffle?Can anyone explain this part of the story? Makes no
sense.