  The Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld (BTW) sandpile model is a cellular automaton which
has been intensively studied during the last years as a paradigm for
self-organized criticality. In this paper, we reconsider a deterministic
version of the BTW model introduced by Wiesenfeld, Theiler and McNamara, where
sand grains are added always to one fixed site on the square lattice. Using the
Abelian sandpile formalism we discuss the static properties of the system. We
present numerical evidence that the deterministic model is only in the BTW
universality class if the initial conditions and the geometric form of the
boundaries do not respect the full symmetry of the square lattice.
