Discount Gambling

A few people have asked me about the countability of blackjack dealt from a constant shuffle machine (CSM). I’m a big advocate of counting the CSM, especially for card craps, because of the ease of the windowed count. Even if the dealer collects no muck (i.e., immediately shuffles completed hands back into the CSM), you’ll still be +EV more than 8% of the time for good BJ rules. It’s a lot easier to count a CSM than a shoe. I call it counting for the ADHD crowd. All you have to do is pay attention to the last 16 cards (or the collected muck) fed into the CSM before the hand is dealt. Plus, you’ll probably never get backed off from CSM blackjack, even when wildly varying your bets.

EV vs. Windowed Count

I use my model of the ShuffleMaster 126 (source) CSM in the blackjack simulations for this post. I’ve talked in detail about this model before, in my posts on card craps. Basically, there’s a buffer of at least 16 cards in the chute (so the dealer never waits for a card), which introduces state into the system. If the dealer collects no muck, you simply use the running count of the last 16 cards fed into the shuffler. Use the simple hi-lo count (2-6 are +1, 10-A are -1). If the dealer collects a lot of muck, and feeds it all into the shuffler right before the next hand starts, then use the count of the entire muck.

For these simulations, I used 6 decks in the CSM, and typical-good H17 blackjack rules (3:2 BJ, late surrender, re-split Aces 3-times, double-after-split). My blackjack analyzer calculates the ideal EV for these rules at -0.445% for 6 decks. I ran the simulator head’s up against the dealer, and kept track of the 16-card windowed count and the subsequent hand outcome. I plotted the next-hand EV vs. the windowed hi-lo count in the graph below.

The graph shows a very linear relationship between the 16-card windowed hi-lo count and the EV of the next hand. When the running windowed count is +5 or more, the next hand from the CSM is +EV. The windowed count is ≥ 5 about 8.2% of the time.

Conclusions

Serious card counters will tell you you can’t count a CSM. But the data above shows that a CSM goes +EV more than 8% of the time. Plus, it’s infinitely easier to count a CSM than it is to count a shoe. You can lose track of the count for a hand or two. As soon as you regain attention, you’ll know what the count is. You can probably vary your bets wildly without attracting any attention or interest from the floor. You can probably even Wong hands when the count is bad. Or less than +5.

Counting a CSM is great for the casual counter. It’s basically short-attention span counting. If you see the last 16 cards into the CSM prior to the deal are low (have a running count of 5 or better), then you’re +EV for the next hand. Even if you just see a net +3 count for the last 16 cards, you still know the next hand will be better than average. You can start/stop paying attention on a per-hand basis (unlike a shoe, where you have to wait for the next shoe if you lose the count).

At it’s simplest, CSM counting will tell you when the next hand will be better-than-average (half the time), or worse-than-average (half the time). So, if you Wong half of the time, you’ll only play the better-than-average hands (EV better than -0.45%; the above curve to the right of count=0), and miss the bad hands. That’s a quick way to reduce the house edge from 0.45% to 0.22% (only play 53% of the hands; wait until the count is ≥ 0).