Shuffle Tracking

It's an open secret that Blackjack is a casino owner's favorite game, the reason is that over the long term they make the most profit from it.  What pleases these casino bosses most of all is that they know that they shouldn't earn as much profit as they do for the simple reason that most people who play blackjack in a casino play for fun, and very few of them actually expect to win, and mostly they don't? There are quite a few "thinking players" who understand the rules and statistics of blackjack, and play to win only. For these players the fun is in battling their wits against the casino and winning. These players have mastered the art of card counting. Contrary to public opinion, card counting is perfectly legal as long as it is carried out without the aid of any electronic equipment. Casinos don't like card counting any form because it reduces their edge by as much as 1.5 percent. If you are a player who uses any form of card counting techniques when playing blackjack in a casino, it is in your best interest to keep a low profile on the subject.
Shuffle tracking is one of the more sophisticated methods employed by card counters. There is an element of mathematics involved in shuffle counting and players who use consistently employ this strategy successfully will have done some considerable homework before using it in a "real life" situation. Before they put their theories to the test in a live casino, most shuffle trackers will have spent long hours honing their technique in computer driven simulations.

In a  live casino environment where the table is playing with a six deck shoe, the cards in the shoe will need to have  been shuffled  120 times before the first hand is dealt. In practice, this never happens and it is nearer to the truth to say that twenty to thirty shuffles are the norm. This means that a shuffle tracker should be able to gauge the order of the cards being dealt through a series of simple mathematical equations. As hands are played after the shuffle, the shuffle tracker should be able to build up a picture of the cards that are about to be dealt before the next shuffle is due and the longer the sequence continues the more likely the player will be capable of forecasting which cards are yet to be dealt.    While this is not an exact science, shuffle trackers do enjoy some advantage, as long as they are capable of totally concentrating on how the cards are being dealt, and there are not too many distractions.

A player who has studied shuffle tracking will also be able to accurately gauge their chances of having a winning run depending on how the cards are shuffled. And make no mistake about the fact that casinos make some fairly specific demands on how the six blackjack decks are shuffled by their dealers.

Shuffling blackjack decks is carried out through splitting the six card deck into around six piles, which are intermittently shuffled to provide as wide a spread as possible. After each pile has been shuffled up to ten times each, they are added together and placed into the shoe, with a cut being carried out around a third of the way through the pack. A shuffle tracker will be looking out for a dealer who is less than professional and shuffles less than the required amount of times, and also "clumps" the piles of cards together without worrying too much about rotating them.   This kind of situation is what a shuffle player is waiting for, and by recognizing the order of the cards that are being dealt, they will have a much clearer picture of the order of the cards yet to be dealt before the next shuffle.  If they are lucky enough to continue to play with the same slothful dealer, they should be able to enjoy a particularly good run.