Actually, all casinos are required (at least in any US gaming authority's jurisdiction) to use cards identifying the casino, to register the card patterns in use and to cancel any floor-used decks taken out of circulation - in Nevada, the work is done by prison labor. Without such tracking, anyone with a little sleight of hand skill could walk into a casino with the right deck and just start swapping bad cards they were dealt with good cards they were concealing.
I have a similar brick of Bee decks - they were, to my knowledge, created by USPC to serve as samples for potential casino equipment/supplies buyers. The decks I have are equipped with barcoded security cards indicating the date and time of manufacture and are traditionally cut. Despite having such security features, they're packaged in standard off-the-shelf Bee boxes rather than the window boxes casinos usually use. Mine were obtained as a gift directly from Bill Schildman, a man who's held a few high-ranking positions in the company - I think he's presently in charge of the Custom Department.
It's likely that these were also intended for such a purpose. Sometimes the company gives these decks away for promotional or other purposes - they treat them as not being all that much different from off-the-shelf packs, really, since they're just free samples. Aristocrats would be a little harder to come by these days, since the brand seems to be less commonly used - it's effectively out of print for the consumer market and casinos seem to be getting moved more and more to the Bee brand. In fact, the company's gotten fussy about Bee - I heard someone say that they're no longer allowing people to make custom Bee decks because of how it's their primary casino brand and gaming commissions were getting picky about the brand's security and integrity.
And yes, Dan and Dave's cards are a version of these cards, but they had decks in new condition with boxes that had not been treated kindly by time, so they printed custom boxes and reboxed the old decks in the new boxes for their stock.
Your particular decks were manufactured sometime between 2009 and now, likely closer to 2009. The telltale sign is the black USPC sticker. Stickers for deck seals came into use in the mid-1980s and the black version replaced the red and blue ones on general (non-custom) decks when the company moved operations from Cincinnati, OH to Erlanger, KY in August of 2009. The box might or might not say "Cincinnati, OH" on it, but the cards within are nearly certainly from Erlanger. They did the same thing with most of their active brands at the time, using up the old Cincinnati-labeled boxes by filling them with Erlanger-made decks rather than destroy the boxes until they ran out of them, then using new Erlanger-labeled boxes. They aren't vintage, but Aristocrats are some fine quality playing cards - nearly as thick as Bee Casino stock and a bit softer. I personally prefer them over Bee Casino stock - I just wish Aristocrat stock was still available.
(Read 1339 times)
