"Hand shuffle"

There still remain a few bits of poker room procedure that I don't fully understand, even after more hours with my butt in chairs in those rooms than I would want to count up.

Here's one: In some poker rooms, but by no means all, when a dealer is doing the shuffle by hand instead of using the machine, he or she calls out, "Hand shuffle, table 6."

What is the purpose of alerting the floor to a hand shuffle? I don't know. My guess has long been that it was to help prevent fraud in high-hand and/or bad-beat jackpots. You know how dealers will tap a toke on a hard surface before pocketing it. The idea behind that is that somebody stealing a chip is not going to call attention to it. I have assumed that it's that same general idea for the hand shuffle--a dealer who is attempting to set the deck in order to achieve some otherwise highly unlikely outcome will not want to call attention to the fact that he is doing so. Thus, alerting the floor to the procedure brings it more out in the open and thus makes it less suspicious.

That theory was confounded today, however, when I noticed the dealers at MGM Grand doing it--a poker room that has no jackpots. (They've probably been doing it all along, and it just never before sunk into my skull that this doesn't fit my theory.) Of course, the same principle could apply to an ordinary hand, just making sure that the dealer isn't putting out a cold deck to the advantage of some particular player.

But I really don't know the answer, and today I am wondering if my previous assumption was all wrong. Fortunately, there are several excellent, knowledgeable dealers among my readers, and I'm confident that one or more of them will speak up in the comments section and satisfy our collective curiosity. (After all, I can't be the only one who has wondered about this, can I?)