stu unger's ability to guess the cards

[darksun]

After watching the 1997 wsop on espn2 on Christmas Eve, I googled Stu Unger to learn a little more about the 3 time winner. In the short biographies that I found was Stu's ability to predict each card in the last 2 decks of a 6 deck shoe

here is an excerpt:

"Stu Unger would bet anyone $10,000 to place 6 decks of cards in a shoe. The bet was that he would correctly identify the final 104 cards (or 2 decks) in the shoe. No one would take the bet. Finally in January 1977, Bob Stupak, former owner of Stupak's Vegas World and Stratosphere Tower, offered Stu $100,000 to identify the final 3 decks in a 6 deck shoe. Without hesitation, Stu counted the final 3 decks (156 cards) and won the $ 100,000 wager. It was the beginning of a life-long friendship."

from: (Dead link: http://www.gregdempson.com/stuungerstory.html)

does anyone know how he did this? Some short of shuffle tracking? It's just really interesting and I would like to know more about it.

 

[T-Hopper]

Re: stu unger's ability to guess the cards *LINK*

Before he came to Las Vegas, Stu was the most feared gin rummy player of all time, while still a teenager. One of his skills from that game would have been remembering how many cards of each rank had been played. With a 6 deck shoe, he'd just have to count a little higher.

As the story at the end of the link below demonstrates, having this information won't do you any good if you don't know how to use it.

 

[zengrifter]

"mnemonic-devices" *link*

Typical of many/most 'card-memory' pros are various "mnemonic-devices" or memory tools - the most popular ones are contained in the exceptional link below. zg
(Dead link: http://www.demon.co.uk/mindtool/memory.html)

 

[BradRod]

That story has given a really great idea for counting using letters.

As a kid I learned how to assign number values to hebrew letters. I still have that ability. I can easily count into the hundreds that way. The first 10 letters have values 1 - 10, the next 9 are 20 - 100, the final 3 are 200 - 400.

It'll be interesting to see what it would be like to count cards that way. Not sure about the division process though for TC. Could be useful with an unbalanced system or to keep a separate side count without confusing the running numbers.

Thanks for the article was very interesting.

Brad