Hi goooner, welcome to the forums, and thanks for sharing your analysis...good stuff

Call me naive, but my take on the question of Playtech or any other major operator cheating by some kind of card tampering method is this:

- the gain is a few extra bucks in the short term before word gets out (as it invariably always does...someone mention Lance again?) and the sh1t hits the fan.
- the loss is irreparable damage to the Playtech brand, lost players AND lawsuits for breach of contract from all of their licensees who are very protective of their own brands

To spend many millions of dollars setting up a sophisticated live deal operation only to take this kind of risk on a game that has a house edge anyway (quite large for players not playing optimally!)...to me this is the height of stupidity and makes no business sense at all.

I tend to agree with the Wizard of Odds (checked his site to see if he'd done any statistical analysis on any of the live blackjack games -unfortunately not)...
What you should be worried about from online casinos is not that they are cheating with the cards. The casinos don’t need to cheat to make money, the built in house edge is sufficient to ensure financial security...What you should be worried about is bad customer service
...extremely bad customer service being no response, ever, when you ask for your winnings to be cashed out