The result comes out of the equipment, and the equipment can be explained

Plate 1The card shoe

A shoe holds a block of one or more decks and feeds cards one at a time through a slot. The dealer draws from it; the cards that come out are the order the shoe was loaded with. In an automated shoe, the device also records the order in which cards leave and can report it, which is how a disputed hand can be reconstructed after the fact.

Plate 2Shufflers and reordering

Between shoes, cards must be reordered. A studio may shuffle by hand, use an automatic shuffler that mechanically mixes the cards, or use a shuffler with a randomising component. Some variants use a continuous shuffling machine that returns cards to the machine as they are played, so there is no fixed shoe at all.

The important honesty here is about language. A machine that uses a random element to shuffle is not the same as a game with a random-number generator deciding each hand, but it does mean part of the ordering comes from an electronic process rather than a human riffle. An operator's description should say which a table uses; if it does not, that is a fair question to ask before you play.

Plate 3Card recognition and the record

Many studios use cards that can be read, either by a shoe or by a table-level reader. The reader does not change the cards; it records what was dealt. That record serves three purposes: it lets the control room display the hand cleanly, it lets a disputed round be reconstructed exactly, and it gives an audit trail that does not depend on anyone's memory of the round.

It also has a limit worth stating. A record produced by the operator is evidence the operator controls. That does not make it false, but it is why independent testing and monitoring, treated on the integrity page, matter more than the fact of the record existing.

Plate 4The wheel and the ball

Roulette in a live studio is genuinely physical. The dealer sets the wheel spinning one way and the ball the other; the ball slows, drops and settles into a pocket. The pocket it lands in is the result. Nothing in the software chooses it, and no amount of player skill changes where the physics puts the ball.

Physical does not mean perfectly uniform. Real wheels have small biases — a slightly worn pocket edge, a rotor that runs fractionally out of true — and the honest description of a fair wheel is "close to uniform and audited", not "perfectly uniform by construction". Studios rotate wheels and have them serviced precisely because physical bias is a real, if small, effect. Dealer technique matters too, which is why wheel procedure is scripted and watched.

Plate 5Dice and ball draws

Dice games and ball-draw games — the kind used in wheel and money-wheel formats — make results the same way: a physical object with genuinely uncertain motion comes to rest, and where it rests is the outcome. In a studio these are usually rolled or drawn in view, sometimes inside a transparent cage or tumbler so the process is visible.

The production challenge is coverage, not fairness: the camera has to show enough of the draw that a player can see the result being produced. Where a format mixes a physical draw with an electronic multiplier, the operator's rules should say which part is which; that split is a fair thing to read before playing, and the compare page sets the mixed formats against pure ones.

Plate 6What "physical" means for proof

Read down the right-hand column and the honest summary writes itself: physical play is transparent about the moment of the result and opaque about the preparation behind it. Trust in a live table is therefore trust in a process and in whoever audits it — which is the subject of integrity — not trust in the visibility of a single spin.