Shuffle Master Gaming

Shufflemaster Inc.

Shuffle Master Gaming (Shufflemaster Inc.) is a company that was founded in 1992 by truck driver John Breeding. He had read Shuffle Master - Shufflemaster about Atlantic City casinos' efforts to stop card counting, and in true entrepreneurial style, after finding this need, he came up with a plan to fill that need. With the help of some engineers, Breeding created an automatic shuffling machine which would constantly shuffle the blackjack deck, making card counting almost completely ineffective. Even though this seemed like a terrific idea for casinos, it took almost 5 years to place 500 of these automatic shuffling machines.

Shuffle Master's continuous shuffling machines increase a casino's profitability in 3 ways:

Prevents card counting
Allows the dealer to deal more hands per hour
Uses fewer decks (4 instead of 6 or 8) which reduces casino costs

Shuffle Master also expanded its business model when it created a new casino game which has become one of the most popular new card games in history, Let It Ride poker. At the time, this was more of an attempt to get more automatic shufflers in the casinos than anything else, but their intellectual property and created casino games have become more and more of a profit center for the company.

Another "casino utility" product produced by Shufflemaster is the Easy Chipper roulette chip sorter, which is intended to make the roulette tables more profitable by increasing the dealer's efficiency. (Allowing more spins of the wheel per hour.)

Casino games which Shufflemaster now promotes include casino war, which is just like the child's game, only with money. (I remember when casino war was a joke in the movie Vegas Vacation.) Newer card games from the company include Texas holdem variations that are played against the casino, like Bad Beat Texas Holdem and Ultimate Texas Holdem, which are played player versus dealer like blackjack instead of player versus player.

Shuffle Master Gaming Inc is a publicly traded company that trades on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol SHFL. The CEO of Shufflemaster, at the time of this writing, is Dr. Mark Yoseloff.