Blackjack Shuffle Tracking

Shuffle tracking is a practice used by advanced blackjack players. The strategy involves tracking a deck of cards while they are being shuffled in order to gain an edge. This is similar to cheating in some ways, but mostly has to do with probability odds like card counting. The technique is actually quite hard to get right, but it can be extremely powerful if you are supplementing this with card counting.

Learn How to do Shuffle Tracking

In order to really milk the benefits out of shuffle tracking, you should be sufficiently good at card counting and have a few years of blackjack game experience under your belt. Shuffle tracking works by first carefully tracking your running card count. Normally when playing with multiple decks, a dealer will reshuffle the deck of cards sometime in the middle of game play to ward off card counters.

Now you need to pay attention to your count. If you have a high positive count, meaning that many small cards have been dealt onto the table, then you know there are still many large ten point cards still in the deck. If the deck is shuffled at this time before the "paint" card have been played, then you know that the remaining cards in the shoe were mostly face cards or high valued ones.

Now you just have to carefully watch this block of cards when the dealer is shuffling them. You can generally determine the location of this shuffled area of the deck inside the fresh shoe that is ready to be dealt. The whole purpose of shuffle tracking then is to continue playing and counting until this area of the deck is about to be dealt. If you tracked the shuffle correctly, you should accurately predict when the paint cards are going to be dealt, or at least with higher precision that normal.

Practicing Shuffle Tracking Strategy

There are two requirements that should be mastered before getting good at shuffle tracking. You should have memorized the blackjack basic strategy and a card counting system. If you want to get good at this, just practice at home, especially with card counting. The difficulty involved with tracking a deck of cards while being shuffled is the fact that there is still much randomness to it. As long as your count is very extreme (very high positive or negative count), you will have some part of the deck that has a very high concentration density of some type of cards, whether it's stiff cards or face cards.

Another way to practice shuffle tracking is to find some software online or a program on the computer that simulates shuffling accurately. At the same time, you can use the software to practice blackjack strategies and card counting at the same time.