Bar coded playing cards

Recently at the bridge club I go to there have been some new packs of playing cards with these black marks on the top and bottom edge of each card.  I wondered what these bar codes were there for, and to be honest I found them quite distracting and irritating.

It appears that these are used in dealing machines when set hands are being dealt for duplicate lessons or sessions.  The machine reads the bar codes and following the program deal the cards to the correct position, i.e. North South East or West.

This saves organisers and teachers a lot of time that would be spent locating and placing the correct cards in the slots on the duplicate boards. A potentially tedious job.