madram: Csms

[madram]

In Get the Edge At Blackjack John May says that CSMs are beatable and gives a technique for finding how many rounds a card will stay in the machine for.But he doesnt give any sort of statistical proof that it works or how you should bet.
Are they beatable?Or was this just a gimmick to sell a book?

[Parker]

> In Get the Edge At Blackjack John May says
> that CSMs are beatable and gives a technique
> for finding how many rounds a card will stay
> in the machine for.But he doesnt give any
> sort of statistical proof that it works or
> how you should bet.
> Are they beatable?Or was this just a gimmick
> to sell a book?

Much of May's book consists of tossing out ideas. I found this though-provoking, others have criticized the book, with some justification, for being short on specifics.

What May is referring to is latency, the idea that cards loaded into the CSM are not immediately put back into play. In other words, if we observed a couple of rounds in which a preponderance of small cards came out, we might have an advantage in the next couple of rounds.

One problem with this is that there are several makes and models of CSM's on the market, and they do not all work in the same manner. The King CSM, by Shuffle Master, is far and away the most popular unit, at least in the US, and is generally regarded as not being exploitable.

So, it is difficult to quantify what sort of an advantage one might be able to obtain without knowing the engineering details of a specific CSM. However, even in an ideal situation, it would likely be no better than playing a 4 or 5 deck shoe with less than 50% penetration.

[Don Schlesinger]

> But he doesnt give any
> sort of statistical proof that it works or
> how you should bet.

No, really? John May would do that?

Hard to believe! :-)

Don

[madram]

> Much of May's book consists of tossing out
> ideas. I found this though-provoking, others
> have criticized the book, with some
> justification, for being short on specifics.

So can i take the bit on card sequencing(ace location) as being not as profitable as he says it isdoesnt seem to be much info on how to do this either

[Mister M]

Exactly what is the theory behind ace sequencing
Does it work, and what methods are suggested to gain the supposed advantage?i.e.How does one actually go about doing this?

> So can i take the bit on card sequencing(ace
> location) as being not as profitable as he
> says it is doesnt seem to be much info on how
> to do this either

[imposterop]

> Exactly what is the theory behind ace
> sequencing
> Does it work, and what methods are suggested
> to gain the supposed advantage?i.e.How does
> one actually go about doing this?

you will never learn about ace locati0n here
Betr t0o learn yourself

[John May]

>So, it is difficult to quantify what sort of an >advantage one might be able to obtain without >knowing the engineering details of a specific >CSM. However, even in an ideal situation, it >would likely be no better than playing a 4 or 5 >deck shoe with less than 50% penetration.

It is better than that. Read the book again. The penetration may be shallow with most csm's, but the penetration is at the point of deepest, constant penetration. In plain English this means you don't have to waste time against initial unprofitable hands off the top of the deck. A 2-decker with 50% penetration is a lousy hand-shuffled game, but if every hand were dealt from the 50% pen point you could make a fortune.

With some models, such as the Shufflestar, the expected profit is higher than with a generic playable hand-shuffled shoe game.

I agree with your comments about the specific nature of CSM's. In addition to the different models, some have different settings, notably the King CSM, which can be set to quite playable levels of card latency. Hence the neccessity of clocking the model. There would be no point providing info on specifics on this matter because the information would be obsolete before it got into print. For those who care patents are filed and can be viewed publicly on-line if you care to examine the specific operation of each shuffling device.

[John May]

> In Get the Edge At Blackjack John May says
> that CSMs are beatable and gives a technique
> for finding how many rounds a card will stay
> in the machine for.But he doesnt give any
> sort of statistical proof that it works or
> how you should bet.

The operation of a shuffle machine can't be determined by pure mathematics or pure simulation so a statistical proof would be of little use unless you know the internal workings of the device. Because of the myriad complexity of the machine and the fact they are constantly being updated I didn't attempt to cover that in the book, but give a general heuristic for determining what those internal workings are.

Regarding betting, it is just the same as with regular blackjack. A TC of +2 in a csm is equivalent to a TC of +2 in a hand-shuffled game.

> Are they beatable?Or was this just a gimmick
> to sell a book?

The overwhelming weight of evidence suggests they are, notably Shufflemaster's own patents. We also discussed this at bjmath some time ago (link below).
As for book sales, as I'm sure Don will tell you, there is virtually no commercial incentive to write a blackjack book, particulary one aimed at the advantage play community, since bi-annual royalties are rarely in excess of a thousand dollars or so. I do it because I enjoy doing it, that's it.

Bjmath thread on csm's

[.]

yes, it's the vampire himself! very cool to see you posting here Mr. May. much better here than on bj21, right... hope to see you post often.

cheers!

[John May]

> yes, it's the vampire himself! very cool to
> see you posting here Mr. May. much better
> here than on bj21, right... hope to see you
> post often.

Although I like the way Parker runs this forum I won't contribute here unless the subject matter involves me directly. This is to assist Parker with keeping the forum productive and flame-free. Thanks anyway.

> cheers!