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When I play casinos with automatic shufflers, it seems like there are more blackjacks than with the conventional shuffled decks. When a player gets a blackjack, the dealer pays the additional percentage to one person. When the dealer gets a blackjack, they get 100% of every player’s bet. I played yesterday in two casinos, one with conventional shuffled decks and one with automatic shuffle machines. In the two hours I spent in each casino, at the one with the automatic shuffler, the dealer got eight blackjacks in the two hours. In the conventionally shuffled decks, the dealer got three blackjacks in the two hours. Is this a pattern that is normal?
[Editor's Note: This answer is written by Andrew Uyal, floor manager at the Cromwell, ex-advantage player, and author of our upcoming book Blackjack Insiders.]
While it may seem like there's a pattern and it’s certainly easy to follow your train of thought, I’m afraid it’s simply a circumstance of variance. It’s quite possible that if you’d sat at the hand-shuffled table for five more minutes, you’d have seen three more blackjacks.
This is something I’ve heard a lot of over the years: “Don’t trust the machines.” It’s easy to think that machines are becoming more and more prevalent, because the casinos use them to help them win. The reality is the casinos don’t need the machines’ help. The games are designed to beat you anyway. The machines allow for far more hands per hour dealt than hand-shuffled games. That’s where the additional edge comes from -- not from the machine magically steering advantageous cards away from you and into the dealer’s hand.
In the two hours you sat at the auto-shuffler game, you likely saw a far greater number of hands than the two hours at the hand-shuffled game. That certainly increases your odds of seeing more blackjacks.
Then there’s the variance factor that I mentioned before. I’ve sat at auto-shuffle shoe games and not seen a blackjack for an unbearable amount of time. I’ve also sat at a hand-shuffle double-deck game (which was deep in a negative count, by the way) and gotten four blackjacks in a row. Four! In a row! Variance accounts for situations like that.
When it comes to the machines themselves, I’ll give you a little info from behind the curtain here. The shuffle machines you see on most blackjack tables, where the unshuffled deck goes down on one side and comes out shuffled on the other side, do not have card reading or sorting capabilities. They just shuffle.
The machines on games like Three Card Poker and Ultimate Texas Hold 'em do have card-reading and card-sorting abilities. What they do not have is card-steering abilities. What that means is the machine reads the cards as they go into and come out of the machine. It also has the capacity of sorting a shuffled deck back into its original sequential order. What it can not do is put good cards in the dealer's hand. It only sees the cards on the way in and out. It doesn’t know where it’s putting them or who’s getting them.
I'll concede that technology is advancing quickly and there are now many different types of shufflers. They're designed to save time and motion, not to alter the play of the game. I’m confident in reassuring you that the machines themselves are not what’s making it harder for you to win. The games do that all on their own.