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Black Jack History
The history of the BlackJack card game itself is still disputed but was probably spawned from other French games such as "chemin de fer" and "French Ferme". BlackJack originated in French casinos around 1700 where it was called "vingt-et-un" ("twenty-and-one") and has been played in the U.S. since the 1800's.
So how did "Twenty-One" become "Blackjack"? Apparently when the game was first introduced in American it wasn't very popular so the gambling houses tried various bonus payouts to get the players to the tables. On such bonus was a 10-to-1 payout if the player's hand consisted of the Ace of Spades and a black Jack (either the Jack of Clubs of the Jack of Spades). This hand was called a "blackjack" for obvious reasons and the name stuck even though the bonus payout was soon abolished.
So, by 1919 special green-felted Blackjack tables were being made and by 1931 Blackjack was the third most popular Nevada casino game after Roulette and Craps. By 1948 it was second only to Craps. In 1958 the first numerically proven basic strategies appeared and Blackjack was well on it's way to being number one.
The first recognized effort to apply mathematics to BlackJack began in 1953 and culminated in 1956 with a published paper. Roger Baldwin wrote a paper in the Journal of the American Statistical Association titled "The Optimum Strategy in BlackJack". These pioneers used calculators and probability and statistics theory to substantially reduce the house advantage. Although the title of their paper was 'optimum strategy', it wasn't really the best strategy because they really needed a computer to refine their system. I dug up a copy of their paper from the library, it is ten pages long and fairly mathematical.
Six years later Edward Thorp developed a system of counting cards. He believed it was capable of determining future card play and thus gaining the advantage. He published his findings in a book titled "Beat the Dealer" which became so popular for a week in 1963 it was on the New York Times best seller list.
The casinos were so affected by"Beat the Dealer" that they began to change the rules of the game to make if more difficult for the players to win. This didn't last long as people protested by not playing the new pseudo-BlackJack. The unfavorable rules resulted in a loss of income for the casinos. Of course, not making money is a sin for a casino, so they quickly reverted back to the original rules. As Thorp's "Ten-Count" method wasn't easy to master and many people didn't really understand it anyway, the casinos made a bundle from the game's newly gained popularity thanks to Thorp's book and all the media attention it generated.
Another major contributor in the history of winning BlackJack play is Julian Braun, who worked at IBM. His thousands of lines of computer code and hours of BlackJack simulation on IBM mainframes resulted in The Basic Strategy, and a number of card counting techniques. His conclusions were used in a 2nd edition of Beat the Dealer, and later in Lawrence Revere's 1977 book "Playing BlackJack as a Business".
Lastly, Ken Uston, who used five computers that were built into the shoes of members of his playing team in 1977. They won over a hundred thousand dollars in a very short time but one of the computers was confiscated and sent to the FBI. The feds decided that the computer used public information on BlackJack playing and was not a cheating device. You may have seen this story in a movie made about his BlackJack exploits detailed in his book "The Big Player". Ken was also featured on a 1981 Sixty Minutes show and helped lead a successful legal challenge to prevent Atlantic City casinos from barring card counters.
Blackjack remains such a popular game because the casino has such a small edge over the player, compared to a game like roulette. Blackjack is also a game of skill; a game of skill in which a knowledgable player can actually obtain an advantage over the casino.
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