Atlantic City Shuffles
Hello all!
This is my first post here and I hope that with my 20 years of playing experience, I can help some of the newest members of the professional, and not so professional, blackjack players.
Atlantic City is a great place to cut your teeth learning the skills necessary to become a great player. One of the best things is that you cannot be barred (or worse) like you can in Vegas and other areas of the world.
I came here looking for some information about conditions in AC, specifically what I read in this post! How's that for luck??
Anyway, I have been playing in AC 99% for the last 20 years and throughout that time; I have been extremely successful, only having 3 single losing years.
However, 2006 and 2007 have been horrendous, not in dollars and cents so much as the losses were minor, but nonetheless losses. What I have noticed is that there IS definitely something strange going on. As the author who originated this thread stated, there seems to be some kind of severe bias being injected into the shoes in AC by the shuffles. The Claridge, Bally's & WWW, Caesars, The Trop and Borgata have changed their hand shuffled games to a 3 split, single pass shuffle.
What I and my partner, who I have been playing together with for 15+ years using the same system have witnessed, is that high count situations are killing us over and over and over. We have been trying to pass it off to standard deviation, but after speaking to a couple of other "regular" counters we know in AC, this may be more that SD in action. I have won for so many years that I figured the odds were just catching up to me, but something down deep is nagging at us. We have been trying to analyze what is happening, but I just can't seem to put my finger on it. We are getting some excellent penetration, sometimes a deck or even less on an 8 deck game, but on average I would have to say 1-1/4 to 1-3/4 deck cuts are the norm, which offers a great playing situation. We avoid the heavy cutters like the plague!! We were avoiding the S17 hit tables too, but now more and more tables are using it. Harrah's is indeed a bunch of GREEDY bastards.
The inefficiency of the shuffles seems to be causing the shoes to climb and drop in 2 deck increments. We use the RPC count and I will refrain from revealing what specific system criteria we use at this time, but we watch this over and over. The count will either climb or drop +20- +30 and then 2 decks later are back close to neutral, most times in one big clump. Then it may drop severely and then rise back again or continue to climb up to a high count again and when we try playing into it, we find out we have been slammed by what we call a "B" mode, i.e.: continuous small card production with an increasing high plus count. This happens many, many times over extended periods of play.
We have experienced these "modes" many times over the years but we are seeing them over and over and over, from more than one joint. We have been particularly careful to find tables that have been open for a few hours so to try and be sure the cards are shuffled thoroughly as possible. It's getting extremely frustrating, and at times we are wondering about our proficiency, but we play together almost exclusively and check and test each other continuously, so we feel we are playing at 99% accuracy.
What I am asking is if anyone who has played in AC for a long time has experienced anything similar to what I have expressed here? I can remember drooling over 4 and 6 deck games, but now I shy away from them because of the volatility of them. We have worked on negative count per hand tests and we have had some success, but I would much rather play a positive count. It's almost uncanny how we can watch the counts rise and fall almost predictably on 2 and 3 deck increments, but not reliable enough to use as indicators of favorable situations.
I hope I have expressed myself sufficiently to others here to hopefully find anyone else who may have experienced these conditions.
Thanks again for providing such a great place to communicate with others and hopefully we can all become the best we can be at beating the casinos at their own game.
MA21