RJT said:
AM's told you as much as he's going to about this. The truth is that he likes to be considered a rebel, breaking all the rule - even in this fairly alternative community, he has to claim that he's going against the established practice. A mavrick if you will....
Thank you for your analysis, Dr. Yerkes.
In response to MrMaster- there are many different methods of predicting and controlling cards based on shuffle analysis (and a couple of other ways like bottom steering) and there is no "established practice." The reason why is that shuffles are all so different. Unlike counting where you can do the same thing on every game, a shuffle technique that is valuable on one game can be worthless on another. Because we do not want casinos to alter their shuffle procedures to guard against these techniques,
we never publicly discuss what makes a shuffle trackable or not nor the shuffle procedures in particular casinos. It takes a lot of work to find a beatable shuffle.
Your stats for the advantages of getting a 10 or an ace as your first card are right. Being you get these cards all the time anyway, you can give yourself a huge advantage just by knowing when they are coming and raising your bet accordingly. The general principle of card sequencing is that most of the cards stay in order through a riffle. By memorizing the cards that went into the discards on top of the aces you have a good general idea of when you are going to see an ace. I say "general idea" because a riffle is rarely if ever perfect, and sequences are often broken by handling of the deck in other ways. But being your advantage is so high when you get an ace on your first card you don't have to be right very often to get yourself a general advantage, as high as that for card counting or higher, and harder to detect by surveillance.
There's also the practice of ace steering where you attempt to control where an ace lands by your play. It's generally not very useful because you never know the exact position of an ace when you are sequencing so you could be moving the ace to the desired hand, or away from it. It also requires sacrificial hands and play which waste EV. My statement about steering aces to the dealer refers only to when key cards show up in the middle of a round. When you are sequencing aces, more often than not the key card(s) will appear at the beginning or middle of a round and you can't do anything but watch the ace sail on by. In a case like that, depending on what your hand(s) are, it is sometimes worth it to avoid drawing the ace yourself as a drawn card, opting instead to let the dealer have a chance at it to make his stiff a little stiffer. It's a novelty play that doesn't have all that much power, just a point of interest to those who are into sequencing play.
