• Home

[ English | Deutsch | Español | Français | Italiano ]

The casino game of Blackjack was brought to the US in the 1800’s but it wasn’t until the mid twentieth century that a system was developed to defeat the casino in chemin de fer. This material is going to take a rapid look at the birth of that strategy, Counting Cards.

When wagering was made legal in the state of Nevada in 1934, black jack sky-rocketed into universal appeal and was most commonly played with 1 or two decks of cards. Roger Baldwin published a paper in ‘56 which detailed how to reduce the casino advantage based on probability and statistics which was very complicated for gamblers who were not math experts.

In ‘62, Dr. Ed Thorp utilized an IBM 704 computer to refine the mathematical strategy in Baldwin’s dissertation and also created the first card counting techniques. Dr. Ed Thorp wrote a tome called "Beat the Dealer" which summarized card counting techniques and the tactics for reducing the house advantage.

This spawned a large growth in black jack players at the US casinos who were attempting to implement Dr. Ed Thorp’s tactics, much to the awe of the casinos. The system was difficult to understand and complicated to implement and thusly increased the earnings for the casinos as more and more folks took to betting on black jack.

However this large growth in earnings wasn’t to continue as the gamblers became more highly developed and more insightful and the system was further refined. In the 80’s a bunch of students from MIT made card counting a part of the day-to-day vernacular. Since then the casinos have introduced numerous methods to counteract players who count cards including (but not limited to), multiple decks, shoes, constant shuffle machines, and speculation has itnow complex computer programs to analyze body language and detect "cheaters". While not prohibited being discovered counting cards will get you blocked from all casinos in vegas.

Log in