I can answer any clumping question here.

[redtop43]

I am a blackjack dealer and a retired actuary. Meaning I have a deep interest in and mole's-eye view of casino blackjack, a high degree of statistical expertise, and an attitude complete tethered to objective reality.

I looked online for promotional material on ASM's and couldn't find any, at least not easily. I didn't expect to get proprietary material, but the manufacturer must have something they publish to get casinos to buy their product.

I asked my shift manager if I could have 8 decks of cards and a couple of hours of private time with an ASM. I wanted to sort the cards by rank, shuffle them, and then analyze the resulting deck to see if more than 1/13 of cards repeated the rank of the previous card. He said no. Not at all surprising, and maybe the T&C of the ASM license prohibits it. The shift manager said he'd be curious too.

I'm under the impression that the ASM does have video recognition of cards and will identify if the 416 cards I put in are indeed 8 valid decks.

Speaking at least for my own casino, I don't think management could write a program like I did in high school:

10 Input "What is X"; a1
20 Input "What is Y"; b1
30 Print "The sum of X and Y is"; a1+b1
99 end

I do get the impression that management is very attentive to hewing to PGCB (Pennsylvania Gambling Control Board) requirements. I don't think they would risk losing the license to print money that a casino license is.

I would say the same thing to ANYONE positing a hypothesis. Call me when you've either had two people simultaneously tracking a series of events with pen and paper, or videotaping said series and logging the results in writing. People misperceive and misremember things.

 

[CORed1956]

I am a blackjack dealer and a retired actuary. Meaning I have a deep interest in and mole's-eye view of casino blackjack, a high degree of statistical expertise, and an attitude complete tethered to objective reality.

I looked online for promotional material on ASM's and couldn't find any, at least not easily. I didn't expect to get proprietary material, but the manufacturer must have something they publish to get casinos to buy their product.

I asked my shift manager if I could have 8 decks of cards and a couple of hours of private time with an ASM. I wanted to sort the cards by rank, shuffle them, and then analyze the resulting deck to see if more than 1/13 of cards repeated the rank of the previous card. He said no. Not at all surprising, and maybe the T&C of the ASM license prohibits it. The shift manager said he'd be curious too.

I'm under the impression that the ASM does have video recognition of cards and will identify if the 416 cards I put in are indeed 8 valid decks.

Speaking at least for my own casino, I don't think management could write a program like I did in high school:

10 Input "What is X"; a1
20 Input "What is Y"; b1
30 Print "The sum of X and Y is"; a1+b1
99 end

I do get the impression that management is very attentive to hewing to PGCB (Pennsylvania Gambling Control Board) requirements. I don't think they would risk losing the license to print money that a casino license is.

I would say the same thing to ANYONE positing a hypothesis. Call me when you've either had two people simultaneously tracking a series of events with pen and paper, or videotaping said series and logging the results in writing. People misperceive and misremember things.

I agree with this. The human mind is so good at finding patterns that it finds patterns that don't exist in random data. Then confirmation bias sets in. It also should be pointed out that, even with accurately logged data, it's going to take a large (probably tens of thousands of shoes or more) sample size to show with any meaningful confidence that the "clumping" or any alledged non-random card distribution is real. Two or three, or even two or three hundred "clumped" shoes doesn't mean a thing. And you'd better be prepared to show that your sample isn't cherry-picked.