Hand forming shuffler with on demand hand delivery

An automatic card shuffling and hand forming device, comprising:

• a card receiver;
• a card shuffling mechanism;
• a card moving mechanism capable of moving cards from the card receiver into the card shuffling mechanism;
• a hand-forming mechanism;
• an output tray;
• a second card moving mechanism that moves formed hands into the output tray as a group of cards;
• and
• a processor for controlling the operation of the device, and when a first hand of randomized cards is delivered to output tray as a group of cards, and when the hand of cards is manually removed, another hand is automatically delivered to the output tray as a group of cards until either a maximum number of hands is delivered, or a signal is received by the processor to cease delivering hands,
• wherein the card shuffling mechanism comprises a vertically disposed stack including a plurality of horizontally disposed card-receiving compartments and an elevator capable of moving the stack generally vertically in order to align a compartment with the card moving mechanism.

An automatic card shuffling and hand forming device, comprising:

• a card receiver;
• a card shuffling mechanism;
• a card moving mechanism capable of moving cards from the card receiver into the card shuffling mechanism;
• a hand-forming mechanism that forms a hand of at least one set of cards within the card shuffling mechanism from cards in the card receiver;
• an output tray;
• a second card moving mechanism that moves an already formed hand as a group from the hand-forming mechanism to the output tray;
• a dealer input;
• and
• a processor for controlling the operation of the device, wherein a first hand of randomized cards is automatically delivered to the output tray.

A method of randomizing and forming subgroups of cards from a larger group of cards, comprising:

• providing a larger group of cards to be randomized;
• providing a card-handling device capable of randomizing said larger group of cards, said card-handling device forming subgroups of cards and delivering subgroups of cards to an output tray;
• inserting the larger group of cards into the device;
• randomizing an order of the cards;
• forming subgroups of cards within the card-handling device;
• and
• automatically delivering an already formed subgroup of cards as a group from within the card-handling device to an output tray.