Do you play ASM games?

[BJGenius007]

Two points I'd like to make: I don't think the house has to be very sophisticated to cheat with ASMs. Also, they don't have to be perfect, i.e., maybe cheating on one round per shoe is good enough.

When this topic comes up, people sometimes say things like, how do they know how many players are at the table, or what if the ASM sets up the shoe a certain way ("cool deck"), but then a player does something unexpected? Doesn't that mess up the whole cheating strategy?

Here's one response. They could have it set up for three people at the table, and make the 4th and 8th cards to be tens. Now the dealer gets a 20 for the first round out of every shoe. There's an advantage right there. After the first round, it is a fair game, but the house is guaranteed to always win the first round.

What if a fourth guy shows up just after the ASM shuffle, and before the first round? Okay, so the cheating won't work this shoe. This shoe will be fair. Probably one guy will leave, and we'll cheat them on the next shoe. It doesn't have to be perfect.

Here's one that works regardless of the number of players. The ASM could just put a bunch of tens and aces at the front of the shoe. If the cut card is placed towards the front, then a bunch of tens and aces will then be at the end of the shoe, i.e, they will never be dealt. This would simulate a "short deck." It would increase the house edge (vs. basic strategy). And it would really hurt us card counters a lot, b/c it would make the count go high (lots of small cards being dealt), we bet more money, but the blackjacks never show up, b/c the good cards are at the end of the shoe.

I don't know if casinos use ASMs to cheat. (Although I'm pretty sure they cheat in other ways, so why not with ASMs?)

My main point is to squash the notion that the ASM would have to have every single card placed just so, and know how many players were at the table, and trust that every player would play as he ought. They can do very easy and unsophisticated things to create, in essence, a short deck, or to create a cool deck that would work, at least for the first round.

Since the thread is always yellow, I can speak more freely.

Regarding ASM doesn't know how many players at the table as you said in the post, that is not how ASM cheats. Casinos may program ASM to cheat only 33% or 50% of the shoes. Say it is set 33%, then ASM will clump a shoe after shuffle two normal shoes. And for the clumped shoe, it just contains face clumps and small card clumps. Say the shoe is composed of face card clump, normal distributed cards, small card clump, face card clump, normal distributed cards, smll card clumps. No matter how many players at the table, when entering the face card clump, most people got 20 so is the dealer, so almost everyone pushes except one or two players get accent card. (Accent cards are important to make the shoe less suspicious. Like among thirteen face cards, they put two accent cards in the sequence.) When entering small card clump (2,3,4,5,6), dealer makes the hand while people stop at 12,13,14,15,16,17. Also it is dangerous to double like 3+6 v 6 or 4+6 v 3 or 5+6 v 5 etc, the players will get a small card while dealer most likely makes the hand. From my experience, some casinos set the clump rate like this: 25% at $25 table, 33% at $15 table, 50% at $10 or $5 table. This will make casinos have edge over BS players and AP.