BY TOM SOMACH

When the State of Pennsyvlania opened its first casinos late last year, there wasn’t much to crow about.

New and stringent laws that finally legalized casino gambling in the state permitted only one kind of gambling in the new casinos: slot machines.

Table games–such as poker, roulette, blackjack and craps–were nowhere to be found.

But–as often happens in the wacky world of gambling–if there’s an extra buck to be made, there’s a legal loophole to be found.

And it appears somebody found it.

Casino operators in the Keystone State may have come up with a way to offer “poker” and some other now-banned forms of gambling, without having to wait for snail-paced state lawmakers to change the state’s slots-only casino legislation.

An electronic table game made by Las Vegas-based Shuffle Master Inc., in which the dealer is a pre-recorded video image of a real person on a huge TV screen, is being reviewed by Pennsylvania casino regulators to determine if it is legal under Pennsylvania law.

To be legal, the odds must be random and the machine must not let one player’s decisions affect another player’s odds, regulators said.

Gamblers in Pennsylvania may like the new electronic table game because, “It offers a variety of games that you can’t get any other way,” said Shuffle Master Inc. chairman and chief executive office Mark L. Yoseloff.

“It’s very social because everyone sits around a table like they would at a table game,” he said.

Last fall, Delaware’s three racetracks installed 54 Shuffle Master games at their slots-only casinos.

Pennsylvania gambling poobahs took instant note of the casino legal loophole which was big enough to drive a Pennsyvlania-made Mack truck through.

The chairman of Pennsylvania’s gambling agency, Tad Decker, told a State Senate committee last week that the Shuffle Master game under review appears to qualify as a slot machine under State law. “It’s quite impressive,” he said.

The Shuffle Master game seats players in a half-circle in front of two 42-inch plasma television screens, one of which shows the dealer and the other a tabletop view of the cards.

The players have game consoles and take turns playing.

The machines can play a variety of card games, including poker and blackjack, and the casino can change the dealers at will.

So are e-table games the wave of the future?

One expert thinks so.

“Table games have been phased out,” said Bill Thompson, a University of Nevada-Las Vegas (UNLV) professor who studies the gambling industry.

“The only thing that keeps table games alive is the popularity of live poker.”

(E-mail Tom Somach at tomsomach@yahoo.com.)