My Ability in Blackjack is a Gift from God!!
I know I maybe a bit late to the party but I think the following article by Arnold Snyder is a relevant extension of the subject of this thread. The article has less to do with what's the best shuffle (to achieve perfect randomness the easiest) and more about the varying advantages of different shuffles and whether or not it's viable to create a system to take advantage of the varying degrees of non-randomness in live shuffles.
http://www.blackjackforumonline.com/...t/manvscom.htm
If someone has the tracking ability to take advantage of non-random shuffles so much the better they are. It's boggles my mind how many serious card players do not even know how to do a simple riffle shuffle on a single deck of cards. Maybe if people learned they would develop a new found appreciation for card games and their craft that they did not have before.
I rarely see a hand shuffled game. I do recall at the one place I see it a dealer that simply could not riffle the cards. It was pathetic. I wasn't really comfortable playing against the dealer. The riffle would often not mix half the cards and have huge clumps in what was being mixed. I am sure this makes things more exploitable for a tracker since zones stay tightly packed but the math of tracking must become a nightmare. Sort of make it up on the fly by what you witness. I was always amazed when the dealer would still be attempting to deal a game in which shuffling cards is required and that the dealer had apparently received no instruction to help shuffle better. Is this the kind of thing a tracker would seek out or try to avoid? Obviously if you could figure out where your zone ended up it may be almost pure but the random nature of the mixing for each riffle was not at all consistent. Example if the dealer was riffling grabs, the bottom third to half might fall before any cards from the opposite grab. Then a small area of somewhat good mixing but most mixing in big clumps of cards among the remaining part were the cards were mixing and then a smaller section on top that was just cards from one or the other grab. I know ST'ers don't like to discuss particular shuffles so a PM would work. I haven't seen this dealer in a long time so that opportunity, if there was one, is gone. I was just wondering if this is something that would be a wet dream or a nightmare. Obviously the opportunity is there to get barely mixed zones but is the opportunity something that would be doable or is a more consistent shuffle required?
PS Anyone that doesn't think this should be discussed in the open forum speak up. If so a PM is what is needed. I hope others respect the request if it is made.
Last edited by Three; 04-03-2015 at 04:49 AM.
That must have been a pathetic site to see a professional casino dealer not able to riffle the cards. I may have laughed him off the table or poked enough fun at him to get him very angry at me to where the dealer would have even made more mistakes or quit his job after taking such criticism. But then again if someone is able to exploit other peoples weaknesses at the table, why point it out to the person and try to improve them to only make it harder on me? Dealers styles are different when handling pitch games and I have even seen a casino dealer that had a robotic style of dealing when it came to pitch games.
Don't want to bring up clumping or non-random order of cards...........but going back to the original poster and the video, I remember that other "experts" stated that until cards had been riffled 7 times, they were not random. Before this video. That the wash did really nothing to randomize cards because they tended to just spin the cards on top of themselves in the same order they came out of the boxes, without much intermixing. I know that Wong in Prof BJ says that in actuality, playing BS with unshuffled cards will result in a small percentage in favor of the player. But without the software to conduct that experiment, not sure. I wonder, just for arguments sake, has anyone with Norm's software or any other simulation, actually ran play to see if that theory is supported? I'm not trying to take this to the disadvantage thread, but I always have personally felt that until a single deck has been played a couple times or a shoe has been run through for awhile, that play with "new cards" just doesn't seem to match what it should. But then that's the short run. And my own personal experience. I don't really like playing new decks.
After all, I know bad beats tend to stick out in your mind but there seems to be certain times off a fresh deck WHEN all the face cards comes out and dealers seem to tie with 20's OR (not in single deck obviously) that a dealer will pull 4 fives in a row to beat the table? This is one of few times that I would say I actually like the automatic shufflers because I figure they will shuffle multi-decks better than the human dealer with cards "fresh out of the box". Chastise me if you like but cards are NOT random out of a box. And card counting is based upon random cards mathematically. So can anyone who is a number cruncher enlighten me or dispel this myth? I mean I know it goes away after a few shuffles but until then.......?
Or is this an impossible simulation or situation?
"Women and cats will do as they please, and Men and dogs should just relax and get used to the idea" --- Robert A. Heinlein
Never bothered to sim an unshuffled shoe. A proper wash doesn't just spin the cards about.
On the seven riffles bit. They are talking about games like bridge where there are 52 distinct cards in a deck. There are only ten distinct cards in a blackjack deck (assuming no bonuses or oddball rules). Enormous difference.
"I don't think outside the box; I think of what I can do with the box." - Henri Matisse
[I've given up trying to paste my previous reply I've typed up but haven't been able to post. Below is a paraphrase of the my comment that was meant to come after Blitzkriegs response to my first post in this thread]
When I talk about Snyder's article being about systems concerning itself with non-random shuffles, what I was referring to wasn't ST, NRT, AS/T but controversial systems that came about in the 80s/90s (I don't know the exact history). Such systems claimed that the regular approach to blackjack (whether BS or counting) was flawed since the strategies were generated assuming perfect randomness (or as close as pseudo-random RNGs computers use can get).
As has already been mentioned in this thread, it is true that an unshuffled deck will benefit the BS player because of how the high cards will clump together (due to the dealing procedure). However, there is a sharp fall off in the advantage. As you introduce even very weak shuffles (ie. ones that do a poor job of randomizing) the advantage disappears at an exponential rate (iirc, could be logarithmic, but exponential seems more intuitive to me).
Though sloppy shuffles may be the ST practitioner's holy grail, for systems utilizing weak advantage indicators such as wins/losses (streaks being even weaker, if they even correlate with anything at all) they might as well be playing against a perfectly random deck.
Last edited by NotEnoughHeat; 04-05-2015 at 11:04 PM.
[QUOTE=MJGolf;157008Chastise me if you like but cards are NOT random out of a box[/QUOTE]
I don't think I can answer the rest of your post (or perhaps I can, but I just don't have the affinity to) however I don't think anyone is going to disagree with you on that one. New card order (A-K, A-K, K-A, K-A) is not random. Hell, even evenly distributed isn't random. If some one made it so that every 13 cards would have one of each rank, you couldn't call that random.
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