Blackjack

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The casino game of Blackjack was introduced to the United States of America in the 1800’s but it wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that a system was developed to beat the house in chemin de fer. This article is going to take a swift peak at the creation of that strategy, Card Counting.

When betting was approved in the state of Nevada in 1934, chemin de fer sky-rocketed into popularity and was commonly gambled on with one or two decks of cards. Roger Baldwin wrote a dissertation in 1956 which explained how to reduce the house edge based on probability and stats which was quite confusing for gamblers who weren’t mathematicians.

In 1962, Dr. Ed Thorp utilized an IBM 704 computer to refine the mathematical strategy in Baldwin’s dissertation and also developed the 1st card counting strategies. Dr. Thorp wrote a tome called "Beat the Dealer" which illustrated card counting techniques and the strategies for reducing the house advantage.

This spawned a huge growth in Blackjack players at the US casinos who were trying to implement Dr. Thorp’s tactics, much to the awe of the casinos. The system was difficult to understand and hard to carry through and therefore improved the earnings for the betting houses as more and more folks took to gambling on black jack.

However this large growth in profits was not to continue as the gamblers became more sophisticated and more aware and the system was further refined. In the 80’s a bunch of students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology made card counting a part of the everyday vocabulary. Since then the casinos have brought in numerous measures to counteract players who count cards including, multiple decks, shoes, shuffle machines, and rumour has it, complex computer programs to analyze body language and detect "cheaters". While not against the law being caught counting cards will get you banned from most if not all casinos in sin city.