THE SHOES ARE A WHOLE DIFFERENT BALL GAME

by Fred Renzey

With today’s six deck shoes however, it’s a different story. When you’re dealing with six times as many cards, it’s much harder for them to get that far out of balance – proportionally speaking. In the shoe game, a 1½% advantage comes along only about as often as that 4% advantage came with a single deck.

As a byproduct of that, in a typically cut shoe-game, the player has the advantage only a shade over 20% of the time, whereas in single deck play he would have the edge about 33% of the time. With such sharply contrasting profiles, the shoe game is much inferior and a lot tougher to beat – if you play it the same way as single deck.

However, since shoe games outnumber hand held blackjack today by such a dominant ratio, most advantage players strive to optimize the characteristics that are unique to multi-deck blackjack.

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