Blackjack Shuffle Tracking Continued

It is possible to split the cards into unequal stacks without realising it. What you might not realise is that they are more often than not, required by the casino to split the deck into unequal stacks, performing the House Shuffle. This is clearly becasue the casino benefits from this shuffle in the long run because most players will not suffle any bad cards out of play.

There are various shuffle methods, one of which is the Zone Shuffle, Strip Shuffle and Stutter Shuffle. The Zone Shuffle is one of the most common shuffle methods and is particular to shoe games. You split the ’shoe’ into piles of between 4 and 8 depending on the number of decks in the shoe. The outcome is a regrouping of the cards in the same scenario as they were before, thereby preventing chunks of cards from being randomly mixed. If the dealer won 40 hands and you won 20, the trend would probably continue until you either run out of money or until the unfavourable bias is removed through lots of shuffles.

If the dealer has been watching carefully and keeping track of how many hands each side has won in the shoe, the dealer can do one of two things. One will be to keep the shuffle the same, but strip the deck, because when a dealer strips the deck, he or she strips off one card at a time from the shoe letting them fall on top of one another onto the table. This process reverses the order of the cards. The main consequence is to remove any advantages that the players may have. The second thing the dealer could do is to change the way they shuffle so the cards are mixed better.