Shuffle Tracking

Shuffle tracking is a technique that doesn't get a lot of attention. It's more powerful than traditional card counting. It's almost impossible to detect. It's 100% legal. Simply explained, it is the science of following specific cards through the shuffling process, for the purpose of either keeping them in play, or cutting them out of play.

Shuffle-tracking is a mathematically-based approach, just like card counting and in fact, shuffle-tracking is based on card counting. The premise of shuffle-tracking is that shuffles are nonrandom. According to some authors, a single deck of cards must be shuffled twenty to thirty times to ensure a truly random dispersion. If a casino is using an eight-deck shoe, that's 160 to 240 shuffles!

So, by saying that shuffles are nonrandom, I mean to say that the location of cards after the shuffle is to some degree predictable. Counting is necessary to have some idea of the favorability of different regions of the played cards, so that these regions may be tracked through the shuffle.

A shuffle after a player can benefit in a one deck game is executed by dividing the deck equally into 26 cards and shuffling them together a minimum of three times. This way the cards are sufficiently intermixed to yield a fairly random distribution. An adverse shuffle prevents the cards from mixing completely.

Some dealers will unknowingly split the deck into unequal stacks. However, more often than not, they are required to split the deck into unequal stacks. If they are required to do this, they are performing the House Shuffle.

Perhaps you've noticed the complicated shuffles many casinos now employ on their blackjack tables. These shuffles are not designed to waste time or to irritate players, but to protect the casinos against the most powerful legal strategy that has ever been devised to wring aut money from 21 ... SHUFFLE TRACKING ...

To protect themselves against 'trackers' casinos have been hiring high-priced consultants, and retraining their pit and security personnel, while electronics and mechanical engineers work feverishly to develop a fully automated shuffling machine that will not only produce a truly random shuffle, but that the masses of blackjack players will accept.

There are a number of shuffle methods. The Zone Shuffle is particular to shoe games (multiple deck games) and is probably one of the most common shuffle methods. Here, the cards are broken into four to eight piles depending on the number of decks in the shoe, and then the shuffling is only performed between the piles.

Thus, even with the uncertainty in pick sizes and riffs, a particular card has a zero percent probability of being in certain portions (most of) the shuffled pile, and a high probability of being in one or two particular portions of the shuffled pile.

The net effect is a simple regrouping of the cards pretty much in the same region of the shoe as they were before, thereby preventing clumps of cards from being randomly mixed. If the dealer won 40 hands and you won 20, this trend is likely to continue until you are broke or until the unfavorable bias is removed through many shuffles.

What if the players are winning the 40 hands and the dealer only 20? If the dealer has been mentally keeping track of how many hands each side has won in the shoe, the dealer will probably do one of two things. One is to keep the shuffle the same, but 'strip' the deck. When a dealer strips a deck, he/she strips off one card at a time from the shoe letting them fall on top of one another onto the table.

This action causes the order of the cards to be reversed. The main consequence is to dissipate any clumping advantages (a bunch of tens in a clump) that the players may have. The second thing the dealer may do is simply change the way they shuffle to help randomize the cards.