Shuffle tracking is exactly that, keeping track of a group of cards that “clump” or stay together (more or less) through the shuffle. If you can follow them through the shuffle, you have a pretty good idea of such “zones” that are rich in aces and tens.
The heyday of shuffle tracking started in the late ’70s, when casinos jumped on the multi-deck-shoe bandwagon, believing that four-, six-, and eight-deck blackjack games were impossible to count. Wrong. The best teams quickly realized that they could play shoe games with much less heat than hand-dealts.
Closely watching the cards, observant card counters noticed that the shuffles (one-pass riffles and restacks) barely randomized six or eight decks, 300-plus to 400-plus cards in total. So they started keying in on how dealers picked up the dealt cards (particularly clumps of tens and aces), where they were placed in the discard racks, and how they held together through the perfunctory shuffle process.
In 1994, the inimitable Arnold Snyder wrote The Shuffle Tracker’s Cookbook. A couple of years later, George C wrote Shuffle Tracking for Beginners.
But by then, the casinos were onto shuffle tracking and they simply switched to two-pass shuffles that effectively killed the technique.
It still works with one-pass shuffles — with plenty of practice and a very good set of eyes — but these games are so few and far between that most APs eschew shuffle tracking entirely.
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