After Steve mentioned being arrested and jailed, he gave me the name of the criminal defense attorney that helped him sue the casino for false imprisonment: Robert A. Loeb of Chicago who says that basically the major casinos are killing the game by offering fewer tables, more continuous shuffle machines, no double after splits and so on.
Curtis says the professional blackjack field is still strong, despite efforts by the casinos to improve their own edge by tweaking the rules or using technology -- for example, replacing multiple-deck games, which can be beaten by counters, with continuous shuffle machines, which can't.
But Grosjean knew that shuffling machines are computer driven and therefore only as good as they are programmed and used: Sometimes, in fact, the devices are surprisingly predictable.
Because he has examined these shuffling machines and knows how they work, he could reliably judge the likelihood that certain cards would be excluded from play.
In Holland, many casinos use continuous shuffling machines (CSM), so that dealt cards are shuffled back into the deck after each hand, in order to fend off card counting.
Like their bacterial cousins, some Helitrons function as "exon shuffling machines" (Feschotte and Wessler 2001).
Now in his fifties, he plays with fierce drive, lacking the intricacy and subtlety of his predecessors but compensating with lightning reflexes that allow him to navigate between backbeats, shuffles, and machine-gun fills.
Their "cymatic matter shuffle", as the machine is called, has been refined.
When Grosjean first reconnoitered the game, he saw that the 12 playing cards used to simulate a pair of craps dice were being shuffled by a machine designed to speed up play and randomize the order of the cards.
A machine shuffles the chips into identically sized columns, and zips them across to be packaged.
