Question of the Day - 08 February 2022

[Editor's Note: For this answer, we turned to one of the world's foremost experts on shuffle tracking, Arnold Snyder.]

This is a very interesting question, but one I can't answer with any confidence.

My general advice to APs is to avoid continuous shuffle machines (CSMs), the type of shufflers that provide no significant penetration into the deck(s), because small packs of cards are continuously recycled into the machine. These machines have no value to card counters or shuffle trackers.

There's also a type of auto-shuffler that shuffles multiple decks, but doesn't have the cards replaced for reshuffling until multiple decks have been dealt out, with the used cards being placed into a discard tray until they're replaced into the shuffle machine. These have the same value to card counters as a hand-shuffled game with a similar percentage of the cards dealt out between shuffles.

But can these types of machine shuffles be tracked?

I’ve heard stories of players who've obtained specific machines for analysis purposes and concluded that they do not, in fact, “randomize” the cards. Instead, they claimed that the post-shuffled decks retain predictable patterns of cards that could be exploited by observant players. One European player tells me that he's analyzed a number of different shuffle machines and that he can profitably track the shuffle on one specific model.

But here’s the thing. Assuming this to be true, don’t expect any blackjack pro ever to write a book describing how to exploit such an opportunity, because it would very quickly kill the opportunity. Such an exposé would have to include the precise make and model of machine that was found to be exploitable.

So unless you can obtain a shuffling machine yourself (not an easy or inexpensive thing to do) and figure out how to analyze the machine’s weakness and how to exploit it, you're pretty much out of luck. You’ll never accomplish such a task without personal access to the machines.

Incidentally, if you have legal access tone, but you don't know how to determine if its shuffle is exploitable, drop me line care of LVA. If you can afford the machine, you can easily afford my consulting fee.