Here was an interesting situation. I played this last night at Vegas Club and two of us had the ten of spades with a rag. The board ended up being 89JQ spades so we both had a straight flush. I tried to get a screenshot but he hit rebet too fast.

Seems to me this can only be pro-player if it's set up so that the dealer can't get any card that's dealt to any player.

This was the first time I played it in a while but was downtown and someone else wanted to play it. The odd thing is that this really resolves nothing. While you can get the same card as someone else, your cards still cannot come up on the board. If you have 88 and there are two other 8's out that are not the same as yours, you're not hitting a set, so you're not 4x raising it.

I really cannot figure out how playing with this fouled deck (or however you want to describe this) benefits the casino enough to be dealing a game that contradicts the table game rules. It seems the value of losing trust in players far offsets the fractional percent this might save.

Yes, it probably saves very little to them (from a collusion perspective) because you can still count your "total outs" since all the players' cards are still going to not hit the board.

Also you're wrong on the example you gave, you're supposed to raise 55+ pre even if you have seen both outs, the pair strength is strong enough alone. Collusion effects are very poor in this game and only influence the most marginal hands.

http://discountgambling.net/2010/01/...-texas-holdem/

He also points out that 6 player collusion only lowers the house edge from 2.2% to 1.6% in the live game. So Shufflemaster allowing duplicate cards for players is largely pointless, and like you say, isn't worth questioning the players' trust, imo.