I became Spidierman with great 6th sense. Actually I played more ASM than hand-shuffled recently. After Covid 19 reopening, the close-by casino began to add face cards and remove aces from 6D decks. Nothing much. Just remove four aces and add small amount of face cards from six deck. Sometimes four. Sometimes eight. Just enough to make TC always negative. For ASM, all cards are there. Once I accept the fact that there are a clump of aces, there is a clump of face cards and there is a clump of small cards at ASM table, I can play accordingly because each clump will appear only once in shoe. And the likelihood for clumped shoe is 75% for the weekend and only 25% for the weekdays. So I just play more on weekdays.
If in early shoe, I encountered a first clump, I just assume I will encounter the other two clumps in late of the shoe and reduced my spread from 10 to 1 to like 4 to 1 for the remaining of the shoe. Reducing bet spread is a life saver for me. (Another life saver for me is that I only sit at the third base and the table must be full or almost full. And my play decision is based on the clump pattern, not TC when I can see clearly see everybody's two cards are either all smalls, or all faces, or a lot of aces in that round. So as the third base player, I can make the best decision as a clump is in progress. Normally I don't care where I sit at hand-shuffled table. But I almost always win when I play ASM table as a third base player at a full table. Full table is my requirement to play. I found if I played with only two or three persons and cannot see the clumping pattern, my result is negative in that condition. So I learned to avoid it now.)
I now show positive result at ASM tables even half of times I have 4 to 1 spread, compared to old days I trust casinos don't cheat and always spread 10 to 1 according to TC, then had negative ev for years from 2014 to 2019. (Maybe even in 2013, but then I did not notice my result at ASM tables are different from hand-shuffled and did not separates results into two different group.) But as I said, most ploppies now don't play ASM because they always lose. So most of them now switched to hand-shuffled tables only. But after a while, casino lost enough, they began to add face cards and remove ace cards. In the end, casinos open to make money. They will find a way to make money. I just don't know how many casinos take the chance that can lose their gambling license. For me, because I side count aces, the dealer has deep penetration like 5.5D out of 6D. sometimes less than 20 cards left, I can guess how many aces are removed after playing three or four shoes.
Just a tip for those who want to exploit at certain casinos. Incorporating these strategies and not solely relying on card counting has reversed my losses considerably lately.
