The present invention is directed to a
playing card dispensing shoe apparatus,
system and method wherein the shoe has a card
scanner which scans the indicia on a
playing card as the card moves along and out of a chute of the shoe by operation of the dealer. The
scanner comprises an optical-sensor used in combination with a neural network which is trained using error back-propagation to recognize the card suits and card values of the playing cards as they are moved past the
scanner. The scanning process in combination with a
central processing unit (CPU) determines the progress of the play of the game and, by identifying card counting systems or basic playing strategies in use by the players of the game, provides means to limit or prevent casino losses and calculate the Theoretical Win of the casino, thus also providing an accurate quality method of the amount of comps to be given a particular player. The shoe is also provided with additional devices which make it simple and easy to access,
record and display other data relevant to the play of the game. These include means for acconunodating a "customer-tracking card" which reads each player's account information from a magnetic stripe on the card, thus providing access to the player's customer
data file stored on the casino's computer
system, and one or more alpha-numeric keyboards and LCD displays used to enter and retrieve player and game information. Also included are keyboards on the game table so that each player can individually select various playing or wagering options using their own keyboard.