Casinos vs Card Counters: The CSM Way

Is card counting in blackjack illegal?

For many US jurisdictions, no. However, card counting is bad against casino business. That's why casinos have put up all these measures against blackjack players using card game strategy to win.

That's why most casinos now use Continuous Shuffling Machine or CSM to combat card counters.

This is not to say that card counting is illegal. But revenues are revenues, and for casinos, of course, hefty profit loss must be worked against, or business will collapse.

Casinos' built-in house advantage is always higher than the players'. Their worst enemy, therefore, are blackjack players who overturn house advantage not by luck, but by skill. Not once nor sporadically nor randomly, but numerously and with constancy.

Of the many tactics that casinos have created against card counters, CSM seems to have been most efficient and most effective. With CSMs, all that needs to be done is to have the used cards returned to the shuffler. This leaves the underlying mathematical concept of card counting inapplicable.

Card counting uses ratio and distribution. First, cards are divided into groups: the low-point group (2 through 6), the high-point group (Ace and 10s), and the median group (7 through 9). Values are then assigned to each group. Card counters then keep a running count of card values each time cards are dealt. As such, a card counter is able to tell when a given deck has more high cards than low cards. The more high cards, the better it is to the gambler's advantage.

With the dealer returning used cards to a shoe and the CSM continuously shuffling the cards returned, there's no way for card counters to determine the proportion of favorable cards to unfavorable cards in a deck.

CSM speeds up games to about 20 percent and this is also bad for the blackjack basic strategy player.

Card counters have made their millions through gambling techniques. Several notorious card counters have also authored books about their blackjack strategies, earning not only money for their publication, but also gaining a following.

While gamblers develop techniques to earn millions off blackjack tables, casinos work as hard to keep their millions. Business has to stay afloat.

CSM or Continuous Shuffling Machine appears to be a very effective solution to the problem of casinos regarding card counters. CSM works by ceaselessly shuffling used cards and ceaselessly depositing cards to a shoe. CSM, as such, secures house edge by targeting the mathematic principle around which card counting is built and rendering it ineffective - the distributive principle of favorable cards to non-favorable cards in a deck.

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