Automatic Card Shufflers

Price £9.99
Website www.clubking.co.uk

Riffling the deck and artfully dealing cards out may look easy but not everybody can do it. With my fat fingers I can barely shuffle the cards in a robotic manner without crashing them all to the floor. Yet a good shuffle is one of the most important elements to having a fair and entertaining game of poker.

So, for uncoordinated sorts like me, should we invest in one of the numerous automatic card shufflers that are available? Card shufflers make the shuffle process very simple. You merely load the deck into the slots and press ‘go’ as they magically fade into the machine amid a whooshing sound, before emerging in a random order. Perfect.

That’s the idea anyway. In reality, most automatic card shufflers are tacky pieces of equipment that will barely do a better job than even the most feeble of human shufflers. Cards are fiddly to load into the machine and often you’ll have to go fishing inside to get lost cards from the machine. This is not to mention the huge amount of power the machine uses – meaning you’ll constantly be buying new batteries to power the thing.

Basically, you are better off taking an hour of your time learning how to shuffle to a competent level. That will always be a far better way of dealing in a home game than buying an automatic card shuffler.