Here is the single most important piece of advice you will ever hear: before betting so much as a nickel at the tables, MAKE SURE THEY DON'T USE AUTOMATIC SHUFFLERS WITH CARD-SCANNING TECHNOLOGY. If they do, chances are they put the technology to work by high-low stacking the shoes. In a high-low-stacked shoe, there is no way the player can win over time. In fact, it's virtually certain that you'll be wiped out within a matter of hours, the size of your bankroll aside. (Is this cheating? Of course. Would anyone ever be able to prove it? No, probably not. And anyone who could could also be bought off 100 times over by a casino with even modest profits.)
However, even if the casino does not use automatic shufflers with CST, the mere presence of automatic shufflers alone should give a card-counter serious pause, particularly if one shoe is being shuffled the whole time another shoe is in play. Why? Because the longer cards are shuffled, the more evenly they're likely to be distributed (i.e., the more likely a general high-low pattern will emerge). This method achieves the same effect as using CST without actually cheating: shoes decidedly unfavorable to the player.
Incidentally, I've learned all this the hard way, having lost over $2,000 playing blackjack at a casino which utilizes at least automatic shufflers of the type described above, if not CST as well. I didn't know the cards were shuffled continuously for 20-25 mins (the avg. length of a shoe) until I was already down a grand or so. After I learned this troubling fact, I persisted mostly out of stupidity and stubborness, but also curiosity: I wanted to see if, as one would expect under such conditions, the count seldom strayed far from zero (i.e., stayed very close to neutral from start to finish). And indeed it did not: out of approx 300 shoes played, I'd estimate that no more than a dozen reached counts of > +7 (or, for that matter, < -7), and no more than three or four exceeded > +10. And of those, ALL of them swung back to zero (or thereabouts) within a hand or two.
The mission was utterly hopeless; that I sat there getting abused for so long is a testament my boundless stupidity, yes, but also to my naive skepticism that a casino would resort to such underhanded tactics to deter counters and substantially enhance their takings from blackjack. Boy, did *I* receive an expensive education!
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