Poker Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Fred Rollings in 1899
Fred Rollings in 1899 invented a device with a rotating table where cards were spread around the center using a detent with variable pressure.[7] In 1901, Benjamin Bellows filled a patent for his device which used "gravity alone for all movements of the cards" by dividing guiding them through moving compartments.[8] Various mechanisms were proposed during the following years with different combinations of rollers, card-holding boxes, combs and pins systems. Most of these machines were manually run by turning a crank which would activate the inner gears and rollers. Randomness could be improved by increasing the number of shuffling turns performed by the operators or by increasing the number of boxes, combs or partitioning chambers in the machines. Some devices were simple boxes with combs that would simulate a manual shuffling like riffle shuffling. In 1925, Charles and William Gunzelmann filed a patent for a simple rhombus-shaped apparatus where the cards were inserted in an upper chamber. Shaking the device would make the cards fall into a lower compartment; the shuffling was ensured by two small wings in the middle of the box that would distribute the cards. The operator would then turn the box upside down and repeat the operation. A glass windows permitted seeing that all cards had fallen into the compartment.
Improving randomness using mechanical tricks
Improving randomness using mechanical tricks After 1930, inventors focused on the design of machines that could directly deal the cards, an idea that was already present in Ranney's machine back in 1892.