What is Shoe?
A shoe is the box from which a dealer draws cards in table games such as blackjack and baccarat, typically holding six or eight shuffled decks.
Using several decks in a shoe speeds up play and reduces the impact of card counting. A cut card is placed in the stack, and when it appears the shoe is reshuffled. How deep into the shoe the cut card sits is called penetration: the deeper it is, the more information a counter can exploit.
Some casinos use continuous shuffling machines, which return discarded cards to the pack after each round. This makes card counting ineffective because the composition of the remaining cards never drifts far from normal.
The number of decks has a small effect on the house edge in blackjack: all else being equal, fewer decks favour the player slightly. In baccarat, the shoe is also traditionally passed between players in some casinos, which plays no part in the outcome but is part of the game's ritual and appeal.
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