History of Blackjack

The Game Before Anyone Could Beat It

Blackjack descends from vingt-et-un, a French card game documented in the 1700s. Earlier ancestors trace further back: Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes described a similar game called ventiuna in a short story published in 1613, making it one of the oldest casino card games still played in essentially its original form.

The game spread to American casinos in the 19th century but did not become a major draw until Nevada legalised gambling in 1931. The “blackjack” name itself comes from a long-discontinued American casino promotion: a 10-to-1 bonus payout for a hand consisting of the ace of spades and either black jack (clubs or spades). The bonus did not last, but the name did.

For three decades after Nevada legalisation, blackjack was understood as a fundamentally unbeatable casino game. Players developed personal preferences for when to hit and stand, but no systematic analysis existed. The casinos took their roughly 5 to 8% house edge from average untrained play and considered the game profitable and uncomplicated.

Baldwin and the First Basic Strategy

The mathematical analysis began in 1956. Four US Army members at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel, and James McDermott, used desk calculators and the institution’s limited computing time to work out the mathematically correct play for every blackjack situation. They published their results in the Journal of the American Statistical Association under the title “The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack.”

Their conclusion startled the field: a player using their calculated strategy faced only a tiny house edge of around 0.6%, far smaller than the 5% the casinos assumed. They had derived what we now call basic strategy through pure mathematical analysis, before any computer had played a hand.

The Baldwin paper was the foundation. Edward Thorp would later credit it as the starting point of everything that followed. But the paper itself was an academic publication; it did not become widely known in the casino world, and the four authors had no further blackjack careers.

Edward Thorp and the Birth of Modern Counting

Edward Thorp earned his PhD in mathematics at UCLA in 1958 and joined MIT as an instructor. In 1960, he encountered the Baldwin paper and recognised something the authors had not pursued: if basic strategy reduced the house edge to near zero in a fresh deck, then information about how the deck had changed during play could push the edge into negative territory for the casino.

Thorp used MIT’s IBM 704 mainframe to verify Baldwin’s basic strategy and then test his own hypothesis. The computer simulations confirmed that tracking the ratio of high cards to low cards in the remaining deck would give a player meaningful edge over the casino, sometimes substantial edge in extreme situations. He developed what he called the Ten-Count system, the first practical card counting method.

In 1962, Thorp published Beat the Dealer, the foundational text of card counting. The book detailed basic strategy, the Ten-Count system, and the math behind both. It became a bestseller (rare for a math book), and casinos panicked. Several Las Vegas operators introduced counter-measures: rule changes, frequent shuffling, multiple decks. The changes were so unpopular with regular players that revenue dropped, and most casinos rolled back the new rules within months. What remained were the structural countermeasures (multi-deck shoes, frequent reshuffles) that persist to this day.

Thorp himself moved on quickly. After establishing the principles of counting, he applied similar mathematical thinking to financial markets, co-developing convertible bond arbitrage with Claude Shannon and founding Princeton-Newport Partners, one of the first quantitative hedge funds. He is arguably more important to modern finance than to modern blackjack, but the blackjack work is what got him onto the cover of Life magazine.

The 1970s: Refinement and Hi-Lo

The decade after Beat the Dealer saw counting refined from theory into practical method. Several authors and analysts contributed:

Lawrence Revere wrote Playing Blackjack as a Business (1971), which translated Thorp’s mathematics into player-friendly explanations and color-coded charts. Revere was as much a teacher as a theorist; his book made counting accessible to readers who could not work through Thorp’s equations.

Julian Braun, an IBM mainframe programmer, ran extensive simulations to verify and refine the published strategies. His work was the empirical backbone of multiple authors’ books in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Lance Humble developed the Hi-Opt I and Hi-Opt II counting systems, more accurate but more complex than Thorp’s Ten-Count. These targeted serious players willing to trade mental effort for additional edge.

Stanford Wong began publishing in 1975 with Professional Blackjack, which used computer simulations more aggressively than any prior work. Wong also coined the term that bears his name: Wonging, the technique of back-counting a table from outside until the count goes favourable, then sitting in. Casinos eventually responded with mid-shoe entry bans, but Wonging was a major edge for the decade or so it worked freely.

By the late 1970s, the Hi-Lo system had emerged as the practical standard: simple enough to learn in weeks, accurate enough that the more complex systems offered diminishing returns. Hi-Lo remains the dominant counting system today, fifty years later. The full mechanics are in our card counting guide.

Ken Uston: The Showman and the Lawsuit

If Thorp gave blackjack its math, Ken Uston gave it personality. Born Kenneth Senzo Usui in 1935, Uston combined a Stanford economics degree, a Harvard MBA, and a career as Vice President of the Pacific Stock Exchange with a parallel life as a professional blackjack player. He joined Al Francesco’s California team in 1974, helped pioneer team play, and went on to write five books, including The Big Player (1977) and Million Dollar Blackjack (1981).

Uston wore disguises, played multiple casinos in single nights, and made counting publicly visible in a way Thorp never had. He also picked fights. After being banned from multiple Atlantic City casinos, he sued in Uston v. Resorts International Hotel. The case reached the New Jersey Supreme Court, which ruled in 1982 that Atlantic City casinos could not ban skilled players solely on the basis of skill. It was a landmark legal victory for advantage players.

The victory proved narrower than it appeared. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission responded by issuing regulations that allowed casinos to ban players for any reason, with no requirement to specify “skill” as the cause. By 1991, the regulatory landscape had moved firmly back in the casinos’ favour. Uston’s lawsuit established the legal principle that counting is not illegal; it did not establish the right to play.

Uston died in September 1987 in a Paris hotel room. Officially recorded as suicide, the circumstances remain contested. He was 52.

The MIT Blackjack Teams

The cultural high-water mark of card counting is the MIT Blackjack Team story, but the reality is messier than the myth.

The first MIT blackjack group, sometimes called the “MIT Blackjack Club,” started informally around 1979, led by J.P. Massar. In 1980, Massar partnered with Bill Kaplan, a Harvard MBA who had previously run successful teams in Boston and Las Vegas. Kaplan brought professional organisation: rigorous training, formal player evaluation, written contracts, audited bankrolls, and disciplined team play structures borrowed from his earlier teams.

What followed was not one team but a sequence of overlapping ventures. Strategic Investments, the most successful, ran from 1992 to 1993 and reportedly earned several million dollars. Mike Aponte was one of its lead players and later trainers; Jane Willis and others rotated through various team configurations. Other MIT-affiliated teams operated under different names through the 1990s and into the early 2000s.

The teams’ edge came from disciplined Hi-Lo counting combined with team play structures that disguised the count from casino surveillance. A “spotter” sat at a table playing minimum bets and tracking the count. When the count went favourable, the spotter signalled a “big player” who arrived at the table apparently at random and bet large. From the casino’s perspective, the big player looked like an undisciplined high roller, not a counter; the spotter looked like a small-time grinder. The pattern was effective for years before surveillance methods caught up.

The MIT teams ended not through any single catastrophe but through accumulated heat. Casino surveillance databases identified team members across multiple properties; the same faces and similar betting patterns kept appearing. By the mid-2000s, most members were either banned from major casinos or had moved on to other careers.

The cultural footprint outsized the financial one. Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House (2002) sold over a million copies and led to the 2008 film 21. Both took substantial liberties with the facts: Mezrich later acknowledged that many scenes were composites or fictionalised, characters were renamed or merged, and key incidents either did not happen as described or did not happen at all. The real MIT teams were less glamorous, more disciplined, and more bureaucratic than the book and film suggest. For team play mechanics generally, the structures the MIT teams used remain the template, covered in part in our bankroll management discussion of pooled-capital risk reduction.

Don Schlesinger and the Modern Math

Don Schlesinger published Blackjack Attack in 1997. The book, now in its third edition, is the most mathematically rigorous treatment of card counting and deviation play available. Where earlier writers focused on accessible explanations, Schlesinger focused on precision: calculating exact expected values for plays, ranking deviations by total contribution to player advantage, and developing the SCORE methodology for comparing strategies on a like-for-like basis.

Schlesinger’s lasting contribution is the Illustrious 18, the list of the 18 most valuable basic strategy deviations for card counters. The list, ordered by his SCORE metric, captures essentially all the deviation EV that justifies the memorisation effort for serious counters. He also published the Fab 4 (the surrender deviations) and full deviation charts containing 100+ index plays for completists. Schlesinger’s work is what serious modern counters reference; Thorp founded the field, Schlesinger refined its boundaries.

Phil Ivey and the New Legal Frontier

The most significant legal blackjack story of the 2010s did not involve card counting at all. Phil Ivey, the poker professional, used edge sorting (a technique for identifying card values from manufacturing imperfections on card backs) to win approximately $10 million at Crockfords Casino in London in 2012 and similar amounts at Borgata in Atlantic City. Ivey requested specific cards and specific dealer handling for “superstitious” reasons; in reality, the requests were designed to enable edge sorting.

Both casinos refused to pay or sued for return of the money. The UK and US courts ultimately ruled in favour of the casinos. Edge sorting itself involves only observation (no devices), but the courts held that Ivey’s deliberate manipulation of dealer behaviour to create the exploit constituted cheating. Ivey lost both cases and the winnings.

The rulings drew a new line. Pure advantage play that uses only observation remains legal; advantage play that requires manipulating the game’s conditions can now be ruled as cheating, even where no device is used. Subsequent advantage play techniques have stayed carefully within the observation-only boundary.

Where the Game Sits Now

Modern blackjack is, in many ways, harder to beat than 1962 blackjack. The countermeasures developed over sixty years are sophisticated and pervasive. Continuous Shuffle Machines eliminate counting completely at the tables that use them. Multi-pass shuffles defeat shuffle tracking. Surveillance databases identify counters across properties within months of detection. The 6:5 blackjack payout, which spread aggressively from the early 2000s onward, increases the house edge by roughly 1.4% before any other rule changes, more than wiping out the advantage of any reasonable basic-strategy play.

Online blackjack, which arrived in the mid-1990s, took the game in a different direction. RNG (digital) play reshuffles after every hand, which makes counting impossible. Live dealer blackjack uses real cards but with poor penetration and aggressive shuffling, leaving only marginal counting opportunities. The online game is fundamentally a basic-strategy game; the advantage techniques that defined the live-casino era do not transfer.

The counter community has shifted accordingly. The “advantage player” framing has largely replaced “card counter” as the umbrella term, partly because counting alone is increasingly hard to deploy and partly because skilled players now combine counting with promotional advantage play, comp hustling, and other techniques to extract value. The full counting-and-deviation system that we cover in the card counting guide still works under the right conditions, but those conditions are scarcer than they once were.

Timeline

The Books That Still Matter

For readers who want to go deeper than any single guide, the canonical literature of the field:

• Edward Thorp, Beat the Dealer (1962, revised 1966). The foundational text. Historically important; not the most practical modern reference.
• Stanford Wong, Professional Blackjack (1975, multiple revisions). The first computer-grounded modern treatment; still cited today.
• Lawrence Revere, Playing Blackjack as a Business (1971). The accessible explanation that taught a generation to count.
• Ken Uston, Million Dollar Blackjack (1981). Part autobiography, part team-play manual. Historically important rather than current best practice.
• Arnold Snyder, Blackbelt in Blackjack (1983, multiple editions). Comprehensive, opinionated, and unusually readable for the subject.
• Don Schlesinger, Blackjack Attack (1997, third edition 2018). The most rigorous modern reference; source of the Illustrious 18 and the SCORE methodology.

The pop-culture books (Mezrich, the various MIT team memoirs) are entertaining but unreliable as factual references or playing guides. Read them for narrative; do not use them as how-to manuals.

Frequently Asked Questions