No Mid-Shoe Entry Signs

When cruising the casino floor in search of a blackjack table to play at, you are eventually going to see a sign on a table that says ‘No Mid-Shoe Entry.’ This means that you can’t join that table until the current players have played through the shoe. The entire shoe.

This is one of those player contrived ideas that they feel will help their blackjack game. Blackjack players who request such a sign at their table believe that there is an order to the cards. They also believe that when a new blackjack player joins the game, they are disrupting the flow of the cards. And disrupting the flow of the cards will ruin the blackjack odds of the players already sitting at that table.

This is by the way completely not true.

There is no order to the cards in a blackjack game. And since there is no order to the card there can be no disruption.

The truth is that the flow of the cards doesn’t have an impact on a blackjack player’s odds. This is why you won’t see any blackjack strategy tips or hints that refer to the order of the cards. The couple that you might find with some digging can actually sound a bit paranoid.

The downside to the misconceived logic is that if one of these order believing blackjack players puts up one of those no mid-shoe entry signs and winds up with what they see as a bad run of cards, they are now stuck with playing out that shoe. Adding another player might just change the flow of the cards. But we’ll never know since they are that hard-core in believing in the order of the cards.

So you can see how this is an ill-conceived blackjack philosophy. Forget no mid-show entry signs and play blackjack to the best of your strategy abilities. It’s the best you can do for yourself. And if you don’t like how the cards are going find another table or wait it out.