Your Pit Bosses do what?
Fill slips, player ratings, game protection, customer service, comps, schedules, enforce procedures, rule on player disputes and spot advantage play. Wait! Spot advantage play? How? From the hour long seminar they attended last year that told them that the way to spot card counters was to watch bet variation and basic strategy variations? LMFAO! 99% of the pit personnel don't know basic strategy on blackjack, much less Ultimate Texas Hold 'em, 3 card poker, Let it Ride and the myriad of carnival games and side bets that exist in today's casino environment. Most pit bosses can't tell the difference between a card counter and a kitchen counter and as a result, back off some of your best customers costing you tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars or more every year. Pit bosses have enough responsibilities. Experts should be making critical business decisions regarding your customers.
So, what if you use use Blackjack Survey instead of your pit bosses? Your surveillance runs down players who are suspected of advantage play because they were observed doing X. You then rely upon a small sample of play from an individual and asking a computer to make a decision what kind of threat this individual poses to you. Well, there are several flaws with this method. BJSurvey only takes a snapshot of blackjack play and analyses it looking for a number of basic advantage plays such as card counting, hole carding and shuffle tracking. Shuffle tracking? With today's laborious, time consuming shuffles, ASM’s and CSM’s, why is anyone concerned about shuffle tracking? Again, if you don’t understand the mechanics behind it and the practical application of it, just throw the kitchen sink at it will solve the problem, right? WRONG! Paranoia and panic have driven casinos to add layer on top of layer of game protection adding laborious procedures that no one even remembers why they were implemented in the first place, so just keep on doing them and keep on throwing hundreds of millions of dollars out the window. When will the insanity stop?
I digress. The snapshot of play that casinos input into BJSurvey is inherently flawed. Without additional information or more comprehensive data, an intelligent business decision can’t be made. I can tell you from personal experience that to fool BJSurvey all you have to do is alternate AP methods and including ones that BJSurvey can’t detect. Apply method A on shoe 1 and method B on shoe 2 and so on. BJSurvey’s final Achilles’ heel is that it relies on humans for both input and analysis.
BJSurvey can only be applied to blackjack. What about all the other games and side bets? You rely upon your employees on those games? What? You make a multi-billion dollar business decision based on your employees who may have attended a brief seminar or two regarding these games, have to look at the pay tables every time they pay a hand, barely understand the basics of these games and can’t even tell you what the basic strategy is? That makes perfect business sense!
Every AP that is serious about these games has spent months studying each game and knows basic strategy backwards and forwards, knows the house edge and disadvantage for every situation, knows the payouts without looking at the table, knows what hands do and don't qualify and knows the hole card strategy for every situation imaginable. You're fighting a war against an army that uses the latest technology and you have done nothing to prepare yourself.