Blackjack Strategy

Read more about the
Las Vegas 2024 Super
Bowl Streaker!

The card game of chemin de fer was introduced to the US in the 1800’s but it wasn’t until the mid 20th century that a strategy was created to beat the casino in Blackjack. This article is going to grab a quick peak at the creation of that system, Counting Cards.

When betting was authorized in Nevada in ‘34, twenty-one sky-rocketed into universal appeal and was commonly played with 1 or 2 decks. Roger Baldwin wrote a dissertation in ‘56 which detailed how to reduce the house advantage based on odds and stats which was really confusing for people who weren’t math experts.

In 1962, Dr. Thorp utilized an IBM 704 computer to better the mathematical strategy in Baldwin’s dissertation and also developed the first strategies for counting cards. Dr. Ed Thorp wrote a book called "Beat the Dealer" which summarized card counting strategies and the tactics for reducing the casino advantage.

This spawned a large growth in black jack competitors at the US betting houses who were trying to implement Dr. Thorp’s techniques, much to the alarm of the casinos. The strategy was hard to comprehend and complicated to implement and thusly elevated the earnings for the casinos as more and more people took to wagering on Blackjack.

However this huge increase in earnings wasn’t to continue as the players became more highly developed and more accomplished and the system was further refined. In the 1980’s a bunch of students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology made card counting a part of the day-to-day vocabulary. Since then the casinos have developed numerous measures to thwart card counters including, more than one deck, shoes, shuffle machines, and gossip has it, complex computer software to scrutinize actions and detect "cheaters". While not prohibited being discovered counting cards will get you blocked from all casinos in sin city.