Info on the one2six
Here is a description of my current understanding of the one2six shuffler as relayed to me by a sharp dealer:
Firstly the machine can be set to use between one and six decks of cards, hence the name.
For Blackjack, casinos will almost invariably use 6 decks (312 cards).
Inside the shuffler is a rotating drum with 38 separate compartments for storing cards.
As cards are inserted into the top, the drum will rotate at an unknown amount for each inserted card, and
the inserted card will become the last card in the compartment.
The compartments will each store anything from zero up to a maximum of 10 cards.
Once 10 cards are stored the machine is ready to eject these cards into the buffered queue for play,
(in the same order they are stored in the compartment).
The buffered queue stores 1-2 sets of 10 cards at any given time.
Once the machine has detected the buffered queue is down to 10 cards it will then eject the entire contents of another full compartment right beneath the 10 cards that are already there.
In other words 10-20 cards in the output queue at any given time. Thereby ensuring that the front of the machine will never run out of cards.
I said earlier that the drum rotates an unknown amount with each inserted card.
The only evidence that I have on this was one time I got to see the inside of the machine as it was being loaded, this was at the opening of the BJ table and the machine jammed on the 3rd card. When the staff opened the machine, the 2 cards that had successfully been loaded were placed 2 segments apart from each other, with the 3rd card ready to follow suit. In other words, for the first 3 cards, the machine inserted 1 card and then moved 2 compartments for the next one. This is by no means a random sequence, so I have my doubts that the machine would have continued
with this very predictable progession. I will confidently say that the storage disk rotates in a clockwise direction when looking at it from the last box.
Assuming that the dealer popped the cards back into the machine at the end of every hand, (something which rarely happens), the soonest you would possibly get any of those cards back out the other end would be 21 cards later, and it would likely only be only one card. As a general rule, since the inserted cards are going behind the existing cards in the compartments, most of those cards won't come back out for quite a while.
What I have seen from my experiences playing many hands from these machines is that they are anything BUT random. Runs of cards and clumping are fairly common. I am still working out a way to reliably exploit them, but I am happy to share with you what I have already discovered so far.........
It is common for the dealer to draw a 20/21 off a 5 or 6 face card when dealing from these machines. This is a disaster for us, when we always stand on low totals from basic strategy. For this to happen, there needs to be clumping of low cards, which seems to happen way too often. Even when the high cards clump together, the dealer will draw 20 and only the lucky players will get by with a stand off. I have often seen seasoned players break with the basic strategy and treat the dealers 5 or 6 like it is an Ace and hit aggressively on totals up to 16.
So how might we exploit the one2six..........? I have been taught by the skilled players (on the higher limit tables) to watch out for the rare situation when the machine is running hot. Specifically this means there is a nice mix of mostly high cards with a few low cards coming out. These cards will bust the dealer most hands. The table will be full of people, but we will only open 3-4 boxes and will back-bet each other to the maximum allowable amount. There are also a lot of winning perfect pairs bets at these times, usually one or more every hand. I suspect that the cause is the machine burys the 5's and 6's somewhere in it's bowels and the dealer simply can't build a decent hand until they re-emerge. I have seen these fantastic cycles go from anything between 5-30 hands. By the time the cycle ends and everything is balanced again, the dealer will have given away thousands of dollars. These cycles happen on the cheap tables too, but nobody really wins much, maybe a run of a few wins at $5 a pop, for a half a dozen hands. Never lasts long when all seven boxes are open, and the $5 players never know to increase their bets and milk it.
Learn how to spot these cycles, when they happen, and only have a small number of boxes open when they do (to get more hands out of the rare situation), and bet big until it stops. Of course, this effect can happen dealing from a regular BJ shoe as well, but I think that the difference is that the effect and length of time can be far more pronounced from an automatic shuffler.
Who knows, maybe card counting can provide a way to detect these cycles from the one2six before they actually come about.
