The Wonder of Shuffle Trak

If you really want to get a meaningful edge at casino blackjack then you are simply going to have to develop skills that are above and beyond conventional card counting. In fact in many casinos, card counting isn’t even an option for the simple reason being that they have automatic shuffling machines that do this function.

Why do casinos have these “bots”, well for one they speed up the game by vastly reducing shuffling time and this alone makes the casino a vast amount of money over the space of a year. But I would like to see the effect of just how many punters have been put off from playing blackjack simply because of the fact that the game has had a large amount of skill taken away.

It would be interesting to see the yearly cash drops from say the past twelve months over the same period a few years ago. Although I would imagine that if they were making less money then they would simply revert back to shoe games! I am certain that the casinos are more than aware of the situation and in that case, it absolutely staggers me that punters can stand for this.

But there is another reason as well although not as important as the first and that is to deny possible card counters and shuffle trackers from being able to get an edge. However in all my years in gaming, the number of professional card counters or shuffle trackers could be counted on the fingers of one hand, they simply didn’t have the necessary skill.

So in no way should casinos be fearful of card counters as the overwhelming majority of them simply cannot create an edge. Shuffle tracking is another very difficult skill to execute. When my first team was active, I had access to a piece of software that at that time, only a handful of people in the entire country had access to.

That software was called Shuffle Trak by Mesa Verde Software. You could implement whatever shuffle you liked into the program and it would track the cards through the shuffle and their exact placement in the next shoe. This was fantastic for tracking high card segments and clusters and when these clusters were at the start of the shoe, it afforded the player a tremendous amount of protection.

This was because of the knowledge that no card counter increases their bet or bets big at the start of the shoe because there is no count information. But shuffle tracking turns this precisely on its head and when there is an opportunity to bet big at the start of the shoe then it provides great cover.

Professional blackjack players do not bet table minimums and then increase to maximums anyway. They have floating big players and use tactics like betting slightly above normal on neutral counts. They do this for the simple reason that getting to £100 is a lot easier when you are only moving from £20. This is less than three doubling up stages.

But if the count gets very negative then the counter can drop to less than £20 as well so he has the flexibility to go both ways. This is how most players operate who play individually but the really successful players operate in teams which is far more difficult to spot.

This article was written by Carl “The Dean” Sampson