by the Green Baize Vampire

Jerry Patterson used to be a respected blackjack author who put shuffle-tracking in print for the first time. I believe his Winners handbook sold over a million copies. He acted as guru to Ken Uston and wrote about table-hopping when the concept was still new.

He had franchises all over the USA for his "clinics" which espoused his methods. Don Schlesinger used to run one of them.

Unfortunately he broke with the blackjack establishment and began promoting Eddie Olsen's "TARGET" system. It depends on the theory that real-world shuffling tends to clump like-valued cards, and explains methods to exploit this.

This theory has never been accepted by anyone outside Patterson's circle. This is mainly because he has never provided any proof to prove the theory behind it. A cynic might think Patterson chose to market a losing system because it is easier to sell: TARGET provides a veneer of scientific justification for all kinds of comforting age-old gambling fallacies.

Although the burden of proof is generally held to be on those proposing new theories, many of the blackjack establishment conducted studies concerning clumping, including Stanford Wong, Arnold Snyder, Bryce Carlson, Mason Malmuth,Ken Fuchs and Michael Hall. Their results were not identical, and some relatively minor effects were discovered, contrary to expectation. However, they were not of the order of magnitude Patterson was alluding to and the only results of any significance were confined to unusually sloppy shuffles carried out on cards placed in new-deck order. Perhaps the most significant finding was that unshuffled cards actually place the basic strategist at a 0.75% advantage, though of course, cards are always shuffled.

Don Schlesinger, after apparently having been shown a "dealer breaking" table, broke with Patterson's association. Most of the blackjack community, after initial caution due to Patterson's credentials, followed suit.

Even Eddie Olsen has quietly abandoned TARGET, his magazine "Blackjack Confidential", rarely mentions the system.

Patterson's credibility has nosedived since adopting TARGET. He has recently abandoned card-counting as one of the tenets of the system, which made it slightly less dangerous, and sadly started promoting progression systems for games like craps and roulette. He remains in business with a clever and aggressive marketing program designed to lure those who have tried card-counting and found themselves on the wrong end of the bell-curve. His initial enthusiasm for pioneering research has evaporated.

It is very sad. Patterson once could have cut it with the blackjack elite, now he is a just a tedious garden variety system-seller.