Yes, it shuffles cards fairly effectively most of the time, and for the pretty cheap price, you can't ask for too much more. Having said that, there are some clear flaws in the design that could be easily fixed by the manufacturer without hurting their profit margin: 1) The stack on one or both sides will tend to "jump" as the machine is running unless weight is applied to the top of the stack to hold it down against the force of the gears that are running beneath it (mine tends to do this on the right side far more than the left). This has led to cards or even small stacks of cards sometimes getting flung off the unit altogether rather than getting pulled in and shuffled. You'll have to manually fix this by placing some kind of weight on top of the stacks before running the machine (like some coins, chips, batteries, w/e). If you're shuffling 4+ stacks, the weight of the large stack will be sufficient for most of the shuffle, but once you get down to ~1-2 stacks remaining, that's when the cards will start jumping unless you apply more weight to the top of the stack. 2) The plastic guard that prevents the shuffled cards from flying out is only secured by a couple small guard rails at the top of the unit. As the cards are shuffled and thrown into the center holder, this pushes the spring-loaded center column down along with the plastic guard. However, the plastic guard itself is not as tall as the unit, so if you're shuffling enough cards to have pushed the guard down to near the bottom of the unit (4+ decks), the guard will slip out of these guard rails, allowing the cards to potentially come flying out unless you hold it with your free hand. Could have been an EASY fix by the manufacturer to simply move the guard rails down towards the center or simply add a couple of additional rails. No idea why they designed it the way they did, and their QA definitely failed in not spotting this problem. However, it's fairly simple to solve by, again, just holding the guard with your hand while the decks finish shuffling. It's annoying and a little awkward, but not deal breaking. 3) The shuffler doesn't always throw the cards correctly into the center column. Sometimes they've flipped over on me or fallen into the center column vertically, causing additional cards to either not shuffle correctly or get jammed up. This can also cause some cards to get stuck on the sides of the center column, forcing you to have to pry them out after you take out the rest of the shuffled stack. 4) The shuffler (at least mine) seems to draw cards in from the left side far more consistently than the right side. Every single time I run the machine, unless I give the left side a fairly significant amount more than the right side, the left side will always empty out well before the right side, leading to ~8 or more cards on the right side that won't be shuffled. Overall - it works, but it's cheap, and so it operates like something that's cheap -- with several obvious and annoying flaws.
