Chapter Plus Sixteen
Circa 1980, I was sitting on the back porch of a friend’s house, beer in hand, as he explained the mysteries of Poker. Yes, the math was important, and bluffing and reading people. But in a home game, the shuffle comes into play. In the Blackjack field, many of us dabbled with sleight of hand as kids — magic tricks. It doesn’t occur to us that people never learn to shuffle. Many people can’t manage a simple riffle. They just jam the cards together a few times. Add to this the rush to get to the next hand, and the cards in a home game are barely mixed together. Add to this the fact that most amateurs set their hands, and you gain powerful clues. (Experts at Bridge, Gin or Draw Poker minimally rearrange hands, except as a deception.) Like card counting, the basic principles behind shuffle tracking are centuries old.
Mark Twain has been quoted: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” While most of us complain that the count never seems to rise high enough, some people work on influencing the count. This chapter focuses on some of the effects of Shuffle Tracking (ST). I will start by warning that this is an advanced method of play and should not be tackled without a prior, thorough understanding and implementation of card counting skills with an emphasis on deck estimation.
One comment before I start. It has been said that shuffle tracking is much like hole-card play because you are using information not available to every player. I strongly disagree. Unlike the hole card, everyone can see the shuffle and there is no effort on the part of the casino to hide the shuffle. Well, until automatic shufflers were introduced.
© 2009 Norman Wattenberger
