Ø  If the Play Zone is cut into the middle of the deck, it is critical that you know when it starts. One method of verifying that you are in the PZ is to use key cards.

Ø  If you cannot gain control of the cut card when needed, this will also cut into gains and this must be recognized. Playing with team member(s) can also help here. But keep in mind that team members basing bets on the same incomplete information and playing against the same dealer upcard can increase risk.

Ø  If the Track Zone has a count of zero, you can cut it out of play and handle it in the same manner as cutting a bad slug out. The advantage is that you can use the smaller pseudo-decks divisor instead of the total number of decks when calculating the true count. You gain the slight advantage of playing with a smaller number of decks.

Ø  Unfortunately, I cannot include shuffles commonly used in this book. If I did, they would quickly cease to exist. Thus, this chapter and everything publicly available is missing information, which you will have to develop yourself. I do not want to leave the wrong impression. Most shuffles are much more difficult than the shuffles in this chapter. Shuffle tracking is not easy.

Casino paranoia over advantage play is well known. Witness the recent silliness over a cell phone with supposed card counting capability. It is difficult to see how this device would cause casinos to lose a dime; and yet we see the pit nervous about cell phones.

Clearly, casinos must do whatever they can to avoid hole-card play. However, paranoia over trackers is self-defeating. Few trackers put in the time needed to shuffle track successfully. Shuffle tracking mistakes are more expensive than card counting mistakes, because you will be betting heavily at the wrong times. The money made by good trackers is balanced out by the money lost by bad trackers. Meanwhile, casinos drag out shuffling twice as long as makes sense costing themselves dearly and boring players to death. I witnessed one casino in the islands that riffled every pair of piles seven times. Seven times. I forgot what game I was playing by the end. 99.9% of players are poor players. Casinos spend an amazing amount of time catering to 0.1% of their customers.

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger