Method, apparatus and article for determining an initial hand in a playing card game, such as blackjack or baccarat

Abstract From the Canadian patent

Methods and apparatus determine a value of an initial hand of playing cards such as determining whether a dealer has the value of twenty-one and/or , outcome of a game at some point before the dealer receives a second card. The initial sequence may be read, optically magnetically or wireless from , identifiers on the playing cards before the playing cards are loaded in a card shoe, while the playing cards reside in the card shoe or as playing , cards are removed from the card shoe. Alternatively the initial sequence may , correspond to a computationally generated sequence such as a computationally , pseudo-random sequence.