Out of curiosity, I tried it this past weekend. :grin: These were my thoughts going in.
(1) Shuffle tracking on shoes is pretty easy because there's no stripping, just riffling.
(2) It's particularly easy if you're a Hi-Lo counter and can already do decent deck estimation.
(3) It's even easier to shuffle-track at the very beginning and very end of the played shoe, because the first and last riffles in a shoe shuffle get diluted with fewer cards in the middle.
(4) If possible, you want to remember generally what the count was like in the middle of the shoe. It's difficult to know exactly where the middle will be because often the dealer inserts the unplayed cards into the middle of the shoe before shuffling. If they hit the exact middle, you can use the ending count to estimate mid-discard count.
(5) The most profitable slugs to track are the ones where the counts "match" - a high card slug being riffled with another high card slug, or a low card slug being riffled with another low card slug. You can cut the low card megaslug out or cut the high card megaslug to the top.
Results:
I was 1-for-3 in doing it correctly.
The first attempt failed because there were high cards at the beginning and end, but the count ended slightly low and the dealer stuck the low count cards right in the middle, so there was nothing profitable.
Edit for clarity: In the 2nd and 3rd attempts, the dealer put half a deck of unplayed cards well below the midpoint, half a deck just above the midpoint, and half a deck well above the midpoint, which means that the midpoint of the to-be-shuffled stack was 2.5 decks played.
The second attempt was a resounding success - the first 10-12 cards had a count of -5 (i.e. count went up pretty quickly) and the last 12 cards had a whopping +10 count (i.e. count plummeted on last hand). The end count didn't matter because the dealer missed the middle with the unplayed cards. The mid-shoe count was dropping like crazy, so the top slugs matched and I cut them to the top of the deck. I was too much of a wuss to go all-in, so I only bet $15. First hand: TT, T9, T8, AT, dealer: T (showed 3, hit T). Second hand: AT, AT, T9, T4, dealer: 6 (showed T, hit T). Third hand: T6, T2, T5, TT, dealer: T (showed 7). I got the hell out after that. :devil:
The third attempt was a resounding failure - I Wonged in, so I don't know what the count was like at the bottom of the discards, but the last 10 card played had a count of -5 and the middle of the discards were also rising in count (i.e. the middle slug had a negative count) so they matched. I tracked and thought I had successfully cut them into the back of the shoe, but I ended up apparently cutting them to the front. The count went up to +10 or so in the first deck played, giving me a decent reason to stay for the shoe but a complete failure for shuffle tracking.
I wish I had practiced deck estimation better, beyond the half-deck benchmark I usually use for Hi-Lo.