Worst penetration ever ? (cross-posted)

I wandered into Trump Plaza in Atlantic City.
I was in search of $25 Six Deck tables.
There were several tables with $25 minimums and $1,000 maximums.

What I found was all tables cutting off 2.5 decks.

Has anyone ever seen a shoe game with penetration worse than 58.3% ?

I know that I haven't.

I visited an indian casino in Mississippi where an 8 deck shoe was being cut almost exactly in half. I asked "what's the point of shuffling 8 decks if you are only going to deal 4?" The dealer (an Indian female) responded "something apparently happened this past weekend and this is what we were told to do..."

However, I have regularly seen DD games with 50% and slightly worse, although that is not a shoe game as you specified. This same indian casino had previously used the width of a playing card (plus a small fudge factor) to mark the point where they inserted the shuffle card in a 6 deck shoe...

Seems like they use multiple decks to protect against counters, then don't trust that "protection" so they take it farther...

They are worried about one real AP in every 500 - 1000 players. They are just cutting their own throats stepping over dollars to save pennys. The time factor of not having action on the table for shuffle and new shuffled shoe insertion, are much worse than the occasional counter. Casinos would be better served using more pen and keeping an eye out for real AP's.

A lot of the histeria is because of ignorance and some degree of envy toward good players.

Was playing a 6 deck shoe game with decent rules and good pen in a remote Indian Casino. Guess I stayed to long, relief dealer comes in, cuts off perhaps 3.5 decks and smiles at me. So I color up and leave, come back 4 months later, same shift, same dealer and he cuts off about a deck. Made my session shorter that time.

A HK APer played at a small country with good BJ game(0.5$ positve off-the-top). The dealer gave him one round to play on the 6-deck shoe... the cut card was about 5 cards from the top. He continued playing and even asked pitt boss opening the neighbor table so that he could play while dealer shuffled. The pitt boss kicked him out pointing he was very suspicious of continue playing.

AT Newport Room.

It happened to me more than once that five of six decks were cut off. Of course, in such a case you have no choice but to leave.

Obviously most of the readers here on the FREE pages are not "getting it"

I am talking about penetration for all players. NOT as a counter-measure against card counters.

What you see at the tables before you sit down.

There are several consultants that the casinos use that address this very issue. They have tried to explain that "short-shoes" actually hurt the bottom line, because the table gets fewer rounds per hour to grind away at the non-AP bankrolls.

It is quite easy to greatly over-compensate for some perceived threat, and end up losing money while patting yourself on the back and telling yourself "job well done, we aren't going to get cleaned out by those damned counters/trackers/etc."

Somehow it seems that the more money you rake in, the more paranoid you become about making sure you keep every penny. To the point where you begin to rake in less money than before. And then you blame it on those damned APs that are killing you, when it really is your own stupidity that is doing the trick quite nicely...

...another inacurate perception is that when counters get caught, they are almost always caught as a winner. As a result, the staff assumes the counter is an almost sure winner all the time for big bucks. Therefore, the counter appears to be extracting bigger bucks more often than what is actual.