Shuffling a 6 deck shoe

Does shuffling a 6 deck shoe in black jack as opposed to just taking the cards out of the discard rack and put them back into the shoe change the out come? Is a good thorouh shuufle good for the house?

I'm sure somebody will come up with a better answer, but yes, shuffling is good for the house. Just recycling the used cards in the back of the shoe will make it really easy for card trackers, both for ace tracking (good trackers can track through a hand shuffle, so this would be cake) and for keeping a count at least until the deck is close to recycling.

It's not really an infinite deck, since you're not mixing the cards back into the deck like a CSM, so if say, eight ten-cards get dealt in a hand, you know that those tens won't show up for a few hundred cards. Determining where to start and stop the count might be tricky, though.

Quote: snakeman97

Does shuffling a 6 deck shoe in black jack as opposed to just taking the cards out of the discard rack and put them back into the shoe change the out come? Is a good thorouh shuufle good for the house?

The house edge is slightly higher when the casino uses a cut card to trigger a shuffle, as opposed to using a continuous shuffler. I try to explain it in my blackjack appendix 10. As the other post noted, continuous shufflers also thwart a variety of advantage plays.

Stanford Wong did a thorough analysis of what happens if there is NO shuffle at all. Ignoring card counters, I seem to recall he found significant clumping, and a negative correlation between cards coming out of the shoe. Overall, I think this turned into a player advantage.

So... if the casino doesn't shuffle (put the played cards to the back of the shoe), but the players don't use this information, they would still gain an advantage.

So shuffling is good for casino