Clumping is an absolute fact of life in modern day casino Blackjack. This "sorting" of highs and lows is generated by the casino card pick up. The break cards, mostly lows, are picked up first, forming a mostly low card clump in the discard shoe. Then the non break cards, mostly highs, are picked up producing a high card clump. Shuffles whether by hand or by machine are designed to preserve this clumping. Why do casinos do this? Because this seemingly innocuous card pick up routine destroys basic strategy and gives the casino a 15% advantage. Early math indicates that simple basic strategy alone produces a 6% player advantage in random cards. The same mathematicians were dumbfounded when that 6% never materialized in actual casino play. Today, even though most players play a reasonable facsimile of basic strategy, required public records show conclusively that the Las Vegas casinos enjoy an average 15% advantage in BJ.

Basic strategy book writers, who you will NEVER find actually playing in a casino with real money, when confronted with this 21% discrepancy in performance, attribute the whole thing to player stupidity. They say that for instance, few players know how to "correctly" play a pair of 4's. This defense borders on the comical. You could play all day without ever getting a pair of 4's and when you finally do, the odds of hitting, splitting, or even doubling against a dealer 7 are virtually even. This doesn't even begin to explain an overall swing of 21% advantage going to the casinos.

Well what does explain it? The casino card pick up routine creates the entire 15% casino advantage. How? Clumping, or the stratification of highs and lows in the dealer shoe AFTER the shuffle. The casinos are not stupid. They would not hand out basic strategy cards to novice players if those cards helped the players win. They don't. They cause the player to lose. The casinos know this. In fact they guarantee that the player will lose overall at a rate of about 15%. Those BS cards are very good for business. When you ask a dealer, "how should I play these?" He will always tell you the basic strategy play. He is trained by the casino to tell you that. He is certainly not trained to help you win.

But how can clumping create a 21% player advantage swing? Easy! Basic strategy is designed on and totally depends on two things: 1. That the odds of the next card out of the shoe being high or low are 50-50. 2. That the dealer break odds are 28% on every hand. Every single play in basic strategy is designed on those two assumptions. Neither are ever true. Lows will follow lows and highs will follows highs more than 50% in every game you sit down to and the more the cards are played and the greater the number of players the more the cards will clump. The more the cards clump the less the dealer breaks the more basic strategy errors. You could play for 30 years, as I have, and NEVER see a dealer break at the required basic strategy rate of 28%. That's almost one out of 4 hands. At a full table on a Saturday night you will be very lucky if the dealer breaks one out of 8 hands. For all practical purposes, basic strategy is compromised. The casinos have known how to beat it, even exploit it, for 25 years. Hence, the 15% casino advantage. The casinos have reduced basic strategy to a myth.

So is card counting. Blasphemy? Not at all. Card counting totally depends on two things: 1. random cards and 2. basic strategy. Random cards NEVER exist and basic strategy is a myth. End of story! I have played this game for 30 years. I know thousands of experienced players. I have NEVER met a card counter who is ahead. Thousands of card counters have converted to NBJ. We have NEVER had an NBJ player convert to card counting.

NBJ is real world BJ. It deals with and exploits the real world situation at hand. It is not swayed by naive myths. NBJ teaches you how to play the real odds and how to exploit clumping to a 15% advantage. It teaches you how to qualify tables, when to play, when to walk and when to run. It teaches you when the advantage is at first base and how to play that advantage, when its at second base and how to play that advantage. They are not played or bet the same way. It teaches you how to "read" the dealers hole card as well as your hit card with amazing accuracy. It teaches you how to insure at better than 50% accuracy with 75% payout. It teaches you how to hit, stand, split, insure or even surrender with far greater precision. it is the choice of the true professionals. If this interests you get back to me.

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