bj bob said:
Slower, how so? A good pitch dealer can deliver significantly more cards per hour than her shoe counterpart. Just look at the physical mechanics involved. In shoe games the dealer has to reach all the way to the mouth of the shoe every card, then slide that card across the table directly in front of each individual player. This could result in a 3-4 foot movement for each card. In a pitch game a veteran dealer has no arm movement, but rather a finger/thumb/wrist motion and I've seen some who can actually maintain 2 or 3 cards airborne simultaneously. I never seen a study as to the exact difference in speed, but my best guess would be around 20% faster.
Sure, the dealer can (they certainly don't always, a fast shoe dealer will easily beat an average pitch dealer) physically deal the cards faster. But the actual playing part, all the little things add up. A player being cute pausing a second before flipping his BJ. A player trying to figure out if he busted, where in a shoe they would immediately be scooped. And lets not forget the dealer has to flip over all the cards when doing pay/take, this goes much more quickly with shoes, where they can also often grab all the chips they need to pay the table in one pass. The only benefit I can think of is if no one wants a hit in pitch, it goes quicker because everyone can tuck right away.
I have almost always gotten more hands per hour when I play shoe games.
There are more factors at work in game speed than how fast the dealer gets the cards on the felt. When you have civilians physically interacting with the cards this cannot help but slow things down.
