| Wong conducted a study of six-deck shoe games several years ago in order to determine the average speed of a game. He discovered that, on average, one player and the dealer take 12 seconds to play out a single hand of blackjack in a shoe game. Each additional player adds another 7 seconds to the length of a single round. The average shuffle for a six-decker takes 100 seconds. Wong was able to conclude that one player at a six-decker gets an average of 248 rounds per hour (RPH), while two players get 158 RPH, three players get 116, four get 91, five get 76, six get 64 and 7 players get 56. If you take out the shuffle time, the RPH changes dramatically. One player gets 300 RPH, two get 189, three get 138, four get 109, five get 90, six players get 77 and seven players get 67. Consider the average shoe game, which has a house advantage of around 0.5%. Let's take a player who has an average bet of $10 playing at a table with four other players. In the traditional game, he is playing 76 rounds per hour. If that player is playing the correct basic strategy for the game described, he can expect to lose an average of $3.80 per hour. Standard deviation would find this player in the range of being down $77 or up as much as $69 about two thirds of the time. About 95% of the time, this player would find himself in the range of minus $150 to plus $142, while he would fall in the range of minus $223 to plus $215 a total of 99.7% of the time. What happens to this player when he sits down at a table with a continous shuffler? His rounds per hour rise to 90 and this changes things considerably. Now, his average hourly loss will be $4.50, an increase of 18%. One standard deviation will find him in the range of being down $89 to being up as much as $81, while two standard deviations will find him down as much as $174 to up as much as $166, and the dreaded three standard deviations could find him down as much as $259, while he could be up as much as $251. The odds are that the player will be on the negative side of standard deviation. If the machine malfunctions and keeps an ace or two out of play, then these losing rates would increase dramatically, and you would never know why you were losing so much. I didn't agree with that team's approach and soon left. For a while I played with the infamous Czech team and also tried a few ventures with some of Ken Uston's old cronies. These groups had huge bankrolls, and once I won $20,000 in thirty minutes only to lose it all back along with another twenty grand within the same hour. Sharp people like Tom Hyland have done very well organizing groups of eager players and launching them on casinos. While more money can be made, potentially, by joining a well-oiled team, there are several negatives. Often, too many fingers in the pie creates problems, such as the time I played six days on one team and won nearly fifty grand. My take? A measly $2,100, because a couple of below-par players diluted everyone's share. Skimming and incompetence also plagued numerous teams, and many bankrolls were gutted by someone's cocaine habit or greed. There is just something about gambling for large sums of cash that can bring out the worst in people. |
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