ortango said:
thanks mike, I noticed they turn it when they check the Ace. I guess the only way would be if a newbie mistakenly checked without turning the cards.
Yes, I've seen that happen. But their procedure if practiced properly by the dealer, involves rotating the cards as soon as the dealer flips them. If a face is turned face up, then the dealer will rotate it so that the card is oriented "vertically" (short edge facing the players). If an ACE is turned face up, then the cards are immediately rotated so that they are horizontally oriented (long edge facing the players). If an offer of insurance is appropriate (and I've seen casinos even offer insurance on FACE CARDS!) it is made and then the dealer will insert the lower right corner of the two cards in the peeper.
Now, if you have a deck of "peepable" cards (cards that the casino uses) and you study them, then if a face was turned up and the dealer turned the cards horizontally as if it were an ACE, then he would see that there was a face down if there was one. You might get a read off of that.
This wouldn't happen enough to make much difference, but do be aware that it "could" happen and you might possibly get some sort of read off the dealer.
Much more often, I see advantage when dealers manually peek at the cards. Lots of good things can happen when they manually peek. Say a Face is turned up and the dealer peeks, pauses and then peeks again! If they do not turn a snapper, you have a pretty good chance of reading the down card as a FOUR because the top of the "4" is so similar to the top of an ACE. Obviously, if you are sitting with a hard-16, you are not going to hit it against the face.
Another ploy with a sloppy dealer that we can exploit is in reading "bent cards". They have to bend the cards every time a face or an ACE is flipped up. Think about the way a down card is bent. FACES and ACES dealt face up to the dealer will be higher in the center when later dealt face down! That might come in handy if you KNEW that a dealer's down card was a FACE.