Shufflemaster buys Oliver Shubert's company

Is anyone worried about this? Oliver Shubert is the programer of Blackjack Survey Voice. He also was on Black Chip before Stanford kicked him out. The story was in Tuesday's Gaming Today.

I thought it might have technology similar to facial recognition where it could identify an individual's voice from a data base. So this is just a program that accepts voice commands. That's nothing to worry about. It takes more time to verbalize cards that it does to type.

"I thought it might have technology similar to facial recognition where it could identify an individual's voice from a data base."

Speaking of voice recognition, I was caught by a "game protector" because of my unique voice. Now if a pair of low-tech ears can catch me, imagine how much more card counters can the almighty-electronic-ears catch, based on voiceprints (like fingerprints)? Perhaps the high tech may be one of the major reasons why Tommy Hyland & "his independent contractors" are thinking to throw in the towels. Here's an excerpt of their recent comments:

"I think the golden days of blackjack are over," Hyland says.

Hyland and his colleagues soberly ponder a job in the real world.

"I don't know what I'd do. In college I thought I would be a teacher," he says.

Anderson, 55, says his days of playing blackjack for a living are "numbered." He's taking the summer off to sell palm trees and produce; a job he says could become full-time.

His son Andrew, 33, recently moved from Voorhees to Breckenridge, Colo., and entered the window-cleaning business. He counts cards maybe once a month these days. "I don't see it being full-time," he says."

"I'm a tired player," Gross says. She works part time for a University of Pennsylvania biostatistician, work that could become her profession.

Dougherty, 42, once had a stint in the car-detailing business but has done little else except play cards in his adult life.

"I've made some money betting on football," he said. "Right now this is a tough thing to do, but I don't know much else to do, so I'm sticking with it for a while."

Source: http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/business-casino/081102CARDCOUNTERSTORY.html

As long as the following casino conditions hold true, no amount of technology is going to help them and, as such, the advantage playing community has no need to worry:

1 - Run by morons.
2 - Juice trumps Merit.
3 - Loyalty undermined by constant job insecurity.
4 - Low pay results in a staff full of idiots.
5 - The vast majority of human beings are just trying to put in their uninteresting 8 hours of automatic work a day with as little hassle as possible and in no way strive for excellence or attempt to transcend the mediocrity of their lives.

". . .
Juice trumps Merit.
Loyalty undermined by constant job insecurity.
Low pay results in a staff full of idiots.
The vast majority of human beings are just trying to put in their uninteresting 8 hours of automatic work a day with as little hassle as possible and in no way strive for excellence or attempt to transcend the mediocrity of their lives."

Your comments are just as valid for casinos as they are for most large enterprises today.

I only disagree that they are "run by morons." Certainly some are, but many aren't. The ones that aren't, though, frequently are out of the control of those actually trying to run them, with the "morons" creeping into higher and higher levels because of the "juice trumps merit" system being so prevalent.

Of course, the "Peter Principle" expressed many years ago still holds true in most large companies. If I recall the quote correctly, it said that employees in a large company generally "rise to their level of incompetence." Casino corporations are no different from any other large corporation when it comes to this principle.

Eventually, some of these incompetents do rise top the very top, where they will eventally run the company into the ground, if they're not replaced quickly enough by someone competent.