Poker 777

Let’s talk about black jack strategy and shuffle tracking, and the different types of shuffling the dealers use in the casino. Which ones are more beneficial to the players trying to track, and which one is downright nasty?

I’d say the shuffle tracker’s worst enemy is the stutter shuffle. In this casino-friendly method of dealer, the dealer splits piles of cards, rifles them and brings them together several different times in different ways. Both shuffled AND unshuffled (played, discarded, never used) cards are mixed together randomly and consistently (it doesn’t happen just once a shoe, for instance). This makes it more or less impossible to really shuffle track when new elements are introduced into the deck routinely.

A second shuffle track method is the “dealer pick.” The dealer takes the shoe and divides it into a couple different piles. He or she then – at random – selects groups of cards to insert into different sections of the shoe. While still hurting the shuffle tracker’s goal, this isn’t as horrible as facing a stutter shuffle. As experts will point out, even a veteran, aware dealer will undoubtedly fall into the habit of doing things a similar way some of the time. If you watch one dealer long enough and learn his patterns, then you can figure out his lulls and use that to your advantage. Also, human error comes into account in this method of shuffling. Since dealers are, believe it or not, human, you have to assume they’ll miss their instructed shuffle instructions, although not on purpose. This means if they are to insert a single deck into the shoe, odds are it’ll be 50-55 cards, and not the exact 52 of a single deck.

So how bad is shuffle tracking. Some (most of which have tried tracking and gone on legendary losing streaks) claim it increases the house edge to between 14 and 16%. This is a ludicrous assumption that’s not even possible, and certainly wasn’t derived from any form of mathematics.

And finally, without delving too deep into it right now, what’s the purpose of black jack shuffle tracking at all? The idea is to find clumps, or whatever you want to call it, of high cards, and try to predict – using knowledge about how a dealer is shuffling – when they will come up the next round of the game. When they do, you can bet accordingly.

Personally, if you’re serious about winning at downloading black jack, I’d stick more to counting methods than shuffle tracking, but I will continue to explore this in the future.