Automatic Shuffling Machines and Card Counting

A casino is like a war zone. Every day the house battles it out with people who try to exploit loopholes in casino games to make money. While the majority of casino patrons are playing for fun, a few are there to strip the house of its profits. Needless to say, the pit bosses are busy looking out for these cheats and advantage gamblers.

Over time, advantage gamblers get smarter. They refine their playing tactics, invent new strategies and develop gadgets to help with their work. But the players are not the only ones improving. Casinos, too, are constantly updating their gaming machines, rules and surveillance equipment to keep up with these pests. It is like an endless game of cat and mouse.

Think of it this way: Casinos are like the human body and advantage gamblers are like a virus that attacks that body. The body's self-defense system develops immunity to the virus. But then the invader mutates into a more complex virus and the battle begins anew.

An example of a war between casinos and advantage players is blackjack. To win in blackjack, advantage players have developed card counting and shuffle tracking. Card counting tells the advantage player when it is safe for them to bet and when it is not. With card counting, the gambler can pick the most profitable times to increase their wager and when they should "lie low."

Shuffle tracking is an off-shoot of card counting. A shuffle tracking expert keeps track of cards bunched together through a shuffle. This occurs because human dealers cannot afford to shuffle thoroughly each time (it would lessen the number of hands played, and thus the casino's profits).

Card counting was a major threat to casinos. Several advantage gamblers were able to prove that card counting works. Their profits ranged from a few thousand dollars to millions, depending on how large the scale of operation was.

But today casinos are fighting back. More and more houses are now introducing automatic shuffling machines. These shuffling machines are designed to make card counting and shuffle tracking useless by constantly mixing up the cards.

Automatic shuffling machines benefit the casino in several ways:

- They render card counting and shuffle tracking ineffective. - They increase the casino's profits by letting the dealer deal more hands per hour. - They eliminate the need for more decks (saves money).

Because of such new technologies, card counting is fast becoming a thing of the past. For now anyway, the casinos are having the upper hand. But it won't be long before the advantage gamblers find new ways to strip casinos of their money. The war continues.