9a. XVP Question Re: Blackjack Constant Shuffle
Date: Tue Mar 10, 2009 11:40 am ((PDT))If I am not a counter, just a basic strategy player, how does the constant
shuffling machines add to the house edge ?
It does not add to the house edge if you are not a counter, but it does, as someone else posted, add to the house "drop" from the game by increasing the number of hands per hour it can get out. Not only does the house make no money during the five minutes or so it takes to go thru the ritual of shuffling a six or eight deck shoe, but it might lose a player who gets bored waiting and decides to try something else (not usually all that bad, most other games are better for the house than blackjack anyway) or to call it a day while they still have money (now that's bad for the house!).
I have never paid enough attention to these to know how they handle bringing in new cards. I know that bringing in new cards (usually done once a shift, in some casinos just once a day) for an eight deck shoe takes about fifteen minutes, since the cards have to be spread out and inspected front and back deck by deck, and the ritual of shuffling them all into a single shoe is much more time consuming than just a "regular" shuffle when the shuffle card is reached in a hand-shuffled shoe.
If the house can just bring in a new machine already loaded with shuffled cards, that would be an even bigger timesaver - or perhaps they can just load the machine with eight decks and let it run for 5 min.
If you are a counter, of course, the continuous shuffling machines take away the valuable information that you get by counting, since the purpose of the count is to know how the composition of the undealt cards differs from "average" - and when you keep putting the discards back in, and shuffling up, you never get that information, because the composition is always the same as it would be on any freshly shuffled deck or shoe. It becomes exactly the same as if the house hand-shuffled after every hand (which some have been known to do on single or double deck blackjack to discourage counters, but with the unfortunate-for-the-house corollary effect of slowing down the game for everyone else - even more than the hand-shuffling of a shoe slows down the game).
--BG
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