Both the Shoe Tells and the Shoe Tells Advanced are somewhat clever takes on old snake oil, but that don't change the facts. They won't overcome the "1/2 of 1%" house edge like the author claims.
Sht I is a progression, but with a twist: the decision points are shoes instead of hands. It is untrue the system will produce steady profits, unless the author is using Anderson Accounting definitions of "profits".
The Advanced Sht is rather devious, in the manner of those slot machines with 9/6/4/3/2/1 pay tables that I assume are meant to draw in those half-awake gamblers who have heard this means the machine is "full pay" and are unaware that this applies to video poker games only.
From the site: (quoted as per fair use)
"The key for this system is for the player to know
when 50% or more of all hands have been won or lost
by all players at the table, and to know when that
50% (or more) won or lost percentage tells us we
should have the advantage for the next hand."
Players then use a sort of "running count" based on the absolute difference between winners and losers. The system hopes to exploit the well-known fact that there is a correlation between witnessing one losing player blackjack hand and slightly-improved player expectation on the next round.
Unfortunately, this effect is far too small to give us a long-run advantage, contrary to what Advanced Sht suggests. In The Theory of Blackjack we find:
"...This led to the tentative conclusion that the
player's expectation would be reduced by perhaps
.10% [for one deck] on a hand dealt following a
win and before a reshuffle."
"...It follows, then, that the player's prospects
must improve following a loss, although of course
not much, certainly not enough to produce a worth-
while betting strategy. When all is said and done,
the most immediate determiner of the player's ad-
vantage is the actual deck composition he'll be
facing, and knowledge of whether he won, lost, or
pushed the last hand, in itself, really tells us
very little about what cards were likely to have
left the deck, and implicitly, which ones remain."
(Griffin pg. 138)
Now if you are of the opinion that playing blackjack is fun, this might be an amusing way to spend your time, and you might even be able to claim that what you are doing is similar to "counting" (to the extent that the radiation from a firefly's butt is similar to a few seconds' output from the sun). But the author's suggestion that this will overcome the house's edge is false.
I also agree with DD' that The Pro seems very adept at designing websites.
On the other hand, so was the Heaven's Gate group.
