Something strange going on?

[wds_42]

Question for the number crunchers.

In a six deck shoe with approximately 80% penetration, how many face cards would you expect to see dealt?

The reason I ask is because I just got back from a cruise and had the worst week of Black Jack I've ever had and it wasn't just me. The house (ship) was just sucking the money off the table. It was so bad that the last night I just stood back and watched three shoes dealt and counted face cards. The first shoe dealt out 80 face cards, the second shoe showed 85 and the third dealt 81. The numbers seemed low to me so I asked the pit boss to pull out some new decks and build a new shoe. He refused. He said that since there was only a couple hours left before they shut down the casino for that cruise, it would be a waste.

So, am I nuts or do the numbers seem hinky? Has anybody ever heard of a casino substituting low cards for face cards?

[stainless steel rat]

easy to answer.

there are 16 10-valued cards (not counting aces of course) per deck. in a 6D shoe, you should therefore have 96 10's to play with. With 80% (or any other %) just multiply 96 by that number. For 50% you should see 48 face cards (on average). Note that this is an average. Sometimes you will see more, sometimes less, rarely exactly 48.

If you consistently see less than 48 in a 50% game, you might have a problem.

For your 80% pen, you should see about 77 face cards before the shuffle...

[wds_42]

I was counting aces as well. So there should have been 120 cards and with 80% pen. I should have seen around 96 each shoe, but i was seeing about 10 less.

So, just one side of the bell curve or someting sinister?

[stainless steel rat]

Depends on the number of samples. If you sat thru 10 shoes and always were ending up -10 in high cards, then it might be a little strange. If this was just for 3-4 shoes, then maybe not...

[FunkyChicken]

Oooh, this sounds like p-value time. If you give the number of times you observed it, someone can give you the related p-value, which will tell you the % of time you'd be likely to see that number come out.

I wouldn't be surprised that a casino might substitute low cards for face cards, though. It seems to me to be the easiest way to cheat the customers and not get caught.