Even so, shuffle tracking can give you such an enormous advantage the standard deviation of your estimated count can be huge and you'll still have a bigger advantage than with straight counting. With one shuffle I have tracked, a typical output for a segment would be a High-Low true count of +5, plus or minus 5. That might seem like an enormous spread, knowing that the true count will be somewhere between 0 and +10 about two-thirds of the time, but I'll put a max bet out on that all day!

To compensate for the errors (we've already stipulated they're unavoidable!) you have to do your homework and calculate what the effect of the shuffling and estimation irregularities are. You will need to use a computer and have some programming skill. What you will end up with, God willing, is a linear equation that you will be able to implement at the table, using the data from your segment counts and chip counting, but without using a computer. This will give you your average true count, and working on your deck estimation and finding dealers with grabs closest to optimum will reduce the standard deviation and cause you to see actual cards closest to what you have predicted.

The problem with merely following a pack of high cards through the shuffle is that the method implies complete ignorance of what cards that pack is mixed with. Thus with a single-pass shuffle, it can be no better than tracking a dealer who's grab varies by 50%.

Changing the resolution of your segment count makes it less controlled by irregularities but also washes away a lot of the information. So as long as you can handle all that data at the table I'd stay right with what you're doing now. The most important thing you have to work on, I'd say, is proper bet sizing. A lot of people have gotten in trouble with shuffle tracking by overbetting, because they are seeing huge counts every other shoe but not taking into account the variance introduced by irregularities in the shuffle.

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