Gambling Royal

Most multiple deck games use either four six, or eight decks of cards, all shuffled together.Assuming a continuous shuffling machine is not used, the dealer  will manually shuffle all the decks together.Shiffling six or eight decks is a tedious and slow procedure, so many casinos now use automatic  shuffling machines .After shuffling, the dealer will  square up to 6 or 8 deck pack,set it down sideways  and hand one of the  players a colored cut card.The player is supposed to silde the card into the pack.If you are offered  the cut and decline it the dealer will offer it to the next player.

The dealer will break the pack at the colored card and  make the cut.She will then reinsert the cut card in the pack, on the four decks from the back end,depending on the policy of the casino,and place the pack into the dealing shoe.The cut card  is now an indicator to the dealer as to when she has to reshuffle.Finally, she will draw  the first card from the shoe and place it into  the discard tray.This is called the burn card.Burning a  card is an old cheating measure in case someone has seen the top card of the pack.

When  a CSM is used, most of the above shuffling procedure is eliminated.The machine,which is combined with a dealing shoe,shuffles four or five decks of cards continuously and feeds them to the dealer one at a time.The dealer periodically places discards into the machine, which get randomly mixed with the unplayed cards.

Since the machine  continuously shuffles the cards,the dealer never has to interrupt the game to shuffle.More and more casinos are installing CSMs because they speed up play by about 20% and, thereby , increase the table income by the same amount.They also completely thwart card counting.