Educating the public about 6:5 and CSM's maybe starting to take effect

Casinos win rate for October on the Las Vegas strip was up by double-digits in all gaming areas. Except for two areas. Slot wins which were up only 6.1%. HOWEVER, blackjack games gross wins on the strip were down 8.8 percent.

I wonder if the casino execs will reconsider their effects of trying to mislead and ripoff the public with the 6:5 games. Also even the ploppies maybe starting to realize that the CSM's aren't there for their benefit.

If the number of blackjack tables is down 10%, then a decrease in gross winnings from blackjack would be expected, and the figure you cited would actually be an indication to management that their strategy is working. I don't know that there's been such a marked decrease in the number of tables; I'm just posing that as a possible explanation.

It may just reflect management's recognition of the increasing popularity of slot machines.

Could you please post a link to the source article? Maybe it contains more data that will shed some light on what's happening. Thanks in advance. :)

Blackjack did not develop a rule set which gave the house no advantage by accident. It was the result of a continuous feedback process of trial-and-error. By simply ignoring six decades of experience and imposing a higher house edge on the public the 6:5 experiment is ultimately doomed to failure. Clueless casino executives may think that people don't understand the house edge, and they would be right, but the fact of the matter is they don't have to, the fewer lucky winners there are the fewer winners will come back.

If the blackjack win continues to fall, the current crop of casino execs will be more likely to replace the games with more slots than they will be to improve the quality of the games for the player, even if that would make them more money in the long-run. One thing casino execs have proven over the last few years is that they hate blackjack, even though it is the largest profit-producer out of all the table games. The fact that a tiny percentage of players can glean a profit from the game just ruins it for them. They will focus on the couple of million those players might win in aggregate from them, and forget the hundreds of millions of dollars they are winning from everyone else. This is truly a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

the "down 8.8%" seems odd in the context of 6:5. IE what percent of a casino's BJ games are SD? I was out there in June and the 6d shoe was the most common BJ offering...

Besides the CSM's, which seem to have gone over like a lead balloon with the gaming public, there is the lessening of penetration at nearly all of the Las Vegas casinos. They do it to foil card counters, but it costs them money. More shuffle time = less action, and less action = less profit.

Think of this. A six-deck table with four players, who have an average bet of $25. For each half-deck cut out of the shoe, the casino loses $200 worth of action per shoe. If the average player is playing at a 2% disadvantage, then the casino is losing $4 per shoe. Multiply this times each table in the casino, and it becomes big money.

A six-deck shoe penetrated to 5.5 decks will yield a little over 21 rounds per shoe to four players. It will take about 12.5 minutes to deal the shoe to the next shuffle. It takes about 100 seconds to shuffle the shoe using simple shuffling methods. Altogether, with a 5.5 deck cut, a casino would get 4.3 shoes per hour, or about 90 rounds per hour with this cut. By cutting out 1.5 decks, which seems to be closer to the norm, the casino is now getting 17 rounds per shoe. Counting shuffle time, the casino is getting 5 shoes per hour, but only 86 rounds. Each round, at $25 per hand, is worth $2. By recucing penetration, the casino loses $8 an hour. That adds up. Using this as an example, a casino with an average of 10 tables in action at all times is losing $1920 per day, or $700,800 per year. The casino's total action is reduced by more than $35,000,000 per year.

Casinos also slow down the games by using complex shuffles designed to foil shuffle-trackers and by closing half-full tables to create full tables. Every single move casinos use to combat card counters and other advantage players carries a cost to the casinos.

Casinos would rather reduce their bottom-line profits than allow any player to make money at their tables on a consistent basis.

http://www.gaming.nv.gov/documents/pdf/1g_04oct.pdf

There will always be opportunities for astute and observant players to beat the house. Most of them are not nearly as obvious as card counting, but on the other hand, many of the other methods are more lucrative on a per-play basis. A casino could foil ten garden variety card counters and have one canny AP slip though and make more than the ten card counters could ever hope to make. A lot of those AP's would have been perfectly happy making their small nut counting cards, but the casinos inspired them to bigger and better things.

The casino bosses ought to know that CSM's are not unbeatable.The costs for these machines are enormous but as long as they achieve the main goal to keep the card counters away they will not disappear.
It seemed for a while that the Green Baize Vampire was alone with his belief that CSM's could be beaten but with "alienated" an other prominent player shares his view and I think I'll soon join the club.Once a week I play a CSM for half an hour and my results are quite good up to now.My only problem is the uncertainty about the latency of reappearance.Is it 50, 75 or even 100 cards? May be you or the Vampire know the answer?

Francis Salmon

Trust me I'm too much of a coward to promote a theory like that alone:)
There have always been at least several dozen people I know of that thought the games could be beaten. I did not innovate all the techniques I have written about.
Some of the techniques people have actually used are more way more far-fetched than anything I could dream up. Of course, most people are more discreet than I am: there are good reasons for that and its nothing to do with selling books:
I have a slight disagreement with Alienated on this one. I fear that the shuffle companies may eventually develop an AP-proof device. They are not even close currently, and I am not even sure it is possible, but I do not want Olaf Vancura or Stanley KO or someone with a brain looking into this. I'd rather the machines just died a death.