The casino game of chemin de fer was introduced to the U.S. in the 19th century but it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that a technique was created to defeat the casino in Blackjack. This article is going to grab a quick peak at the birth of that strategy, Counting Cards.
When casino gambling was approved in the state of Nevada in 1934, Blackjack sky-rocketed into universal appeal and was most commonly played with 1 or 2 decks of cards. Roger Baldwin wrote a paper in 1956 which described how to reduce the casino edge based on probability and performance history which was quite complicated for gamblers who weren’t math experts.
In ‘62, Dr. Ed Thorp used an IBM 704 computer to refine the mathematical strategy in Baldwin’s paper and also developed the 1st card counting techniques. Dr. Thorp authored a book called "Beat the Dealer" which outlined card counting strategies and the practices for reducing the casino advantage.
This created a large increase in Blackjack competitors at the US casinos who were attempting to put into practice Dr. Ed Thorp’s tactics, much to the amazement of the casinos. The strategy was hard to comprehend and hard to put into practice and therefore expanded the profits for the casinos as more and more people took to wagering on black jack.
However this massive growth in profits wasn’t to continue as the players became more sophisticated and more accomplished and the system was further refined. In the 80’s a group of students from MIT made card counting a part of the regular vocabulary. Since then the casinos have brought in countless measures to counteract card counters including (but not limited to), more than one deck, shoes, shuffle machines, and rumor has it, sophisticated computer programs to analyze body language and identify "cheaters". While not prohibited being caught counting cards will get you banned from most if not all casinos in sin city.
This entry was posted on January 29, 2010, 6:22 am and is filed under Blackjack. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.