Are you playing hand held games? They say card clumping isn't the problem, but it could very well be. I only look for games in which there's a correlation with the count. Just observe the game (don't play) and watch if the deck is going negative, and blocks of 10 valued cars keep coming... or if the count is going highly positive and small cards usually mixed with Aces & 9's are still coming out, or a lot of 7,8,9 combination hands. I'd stay away from the table until the cards appear to come out random and correlate with the TC on average. Sure this happens over time naturally, but it's the frequency of it happening you're more concerned about here. If blocks of 10's come out in the beginning and or middle, everyone gets 20 being a solid 10 push across the board... just the same as taking those 10's out of the deck. If there's a clump of 12 or more 10's behind the cut card, you'll get this false positive TC in which you will bet into and get S*ht hands... esp. small card double down hands (5,5 5,6 4,6 4,7 3,4 2,9...) then receive another small card. =) It happens and there are shuffling machines which can be programmed to do this
What was revealed to me by someone at some casino here... is take ~ 12 - 14 ten valued cards mixed with a couple 9's and put a clump of A,2,3,4 & 9's above that. Keep this stack at the bottom then proceed with the house shuffle in which you will employ unbalanced picks and only shuffle into the top 50%, or middle 50% of the cards. You have to be consistent when you do this. You'd be surprised how this circumvents the outcome =) Sure it'll eventually wash itself out over time, but the machine can keep doing this every so rounds to keep giving you poor combinations that don't play well against the house. The algorithms used are more sophisticated than just clumping 10's out of play, and keeping aces away from the 10's (this will also give you poor cards on split aces). They can put the cards into clumps that produce poor 2 card totals more often then what would be considered the average norm. This is all based on those BS cards (which they like to hand out or sell at the shops) not to mention the player makes the first move. I"m not discouraging BS or Card Counting. I myself employ HiOptII w/side count of aces. But the game can be adulterated to counteract Basic Strategy and or Card Counting to increase the drop. I just know what to look for before I sit down
Just like there's no such thing as naked shorting (phantom shares) in the markets (it wasn't really talked about for a while until now...)... but where there's money there's corruption and the big boys get golden parachutes while the average Joe gets a prison sentence!
