(Blackjack continued)

Shuffle Tracking

     

I much prefer shuffle smacking. When you get a bad shuffle, smack the dealer. Unfortunately, you can only do this once per casino. To put it bluntly, shuffle tracing is nonsense. The general idea is that a player keeps up with the positive/negative counts of different regions of the deck(s) and uses this information to possibly cut low cards out of the next shoe or to know when the next shoe will produce big cards. This concept puts all its eggs in one very frail dry rot basket which follows: shuffles at the blackjack table do not produce a random ordering of cards.

Shuffle trackers believe that cards remain sufficiently clumped from one shoe to the next. Therefore, if they are asked to cut the cards, they use their knowledge of where the clumps reside to try and cut out small cards from the next shoe. And, for example, if they know the next shoe is front loaded with big cards, they will of course bet more.

Here is a brief explanation as to why I am a non-believer. First of all, even if cards are clumped, (which I don't think they are 'clumped' enough to matter) the ability to track the clump from one shoe to the next would require knowing where the clump starts in the shuffle and the dynamics of where the clump travels through the shuffle in order to predict where the clump winds up in the next shoe. If you have played blackjack at a casino you have watched a dealer shuffle. The way dealers shuffle from casino to casino differ slightly, but all of the shuffle techniques are elaborate rituals designed for the very purpose of producing a random ordering of cards.

None of the shuffles produce a truly random ordering of cards. As a matter of fact, nothing will produce a truly random ordering of cards. Randomness is a matter of scope. The closer you look at something, the more you are able to understand and describe the variables that produce a result. The real question should be do the shuffles produce a "random enough" ordering of cards. I say yes; shuffle trackers say no.