Being that we go to an Engineering University with people who are good at math, was just wondering if anyone has read the book or seen the movie. I read the book on the plane last week, then saw the movie last Friday when i got home. I thought the book was excellent and very interesting. The movie was good, but was different from the book on some things after going through the Hollywood process. Just wondering if anyone had any thoughts on either

I have not but I am intrigued. Obviously you can push returns on blackjack over 100% if you can count cards with any degree of success... very interesting.

I havent read the book but I want to after seeing the movie. I thought it was really good, way better than the reviews.

just so you know, most casinos in vegas now have card shufflers, 6 decks of cards to choose from, and never more than 1 deck of cards in the discard bin.

Haven't seen the movie but apparently Kate Bosworth can't remember making part of it.
Kate gets wasted

Not true. Insofar as counting itself is concerned, you have to be very good at it. A single mistake in counting and you can lose your entire advantage. And, since the premise of counting involves betting large amounts when the count is in your favor, thinking you have a favorable count when you don't is disastrous. Then there's the heat. Not only do you have to be very good at counting, you have to be very good at disguising the fact that you are counting.



If you're talking about the standard shufflers (the ones where you stick the entire shoe in and 45 seconds later it gives it back to you, now shuffled), at the normal tables you can expect to go through about half of a shoe per shuffle. If they shuffled whenever there was 1 deck's worth of cards in the discard pile, the table had a full 7 players plus the dealer, and nobody ever took any extra cards, they'd be shuffling every 4th hand. If you're talking about the continuous shuffling machines, the only one I saw on my trip to Vegas last month was at the Casino War table at Bally's, and that was the only one I'd ever seen, in Missouri or Vegas (been to Vegas 3 times in the last 2.5 years). Continuous shufflers pose the problem of shuffle tracking, especially when you don't give them enough time between dumping in cards to be shuffled and dealing them out.

I haven't seen the film or read the book, but I think I got the happy middle between the two. The History channel has a special about the real team in it's rotation now. I caught that some time last week and it was pretty cool.