History of blackjack and card counting

Blackjack originated in French Casinos in the 1700s and became popular in America during the 1800s. The term “Black Jack” was made famous because certain casinos and gambling dens offered a payout at odds of ten to one if a player held the jack of spades and the ace of spades; the rule was soon discarded, but the name stuck.

As the game began to spread, players looked for ways to beat the house through card counting and other ‘advantage play’. In 1962 Edward O Thorpe, a maths professor at MIT, wrote the seminal text on card counting, “Beat the Dealer”, which explained that blackjack could be beaten by a skilled player. Using Fortran, Thorpe modelled and analysed the game on an IBM 704, one of the earliest computers, and assigned values to each card dealt. Players kept a running count of the cards that had come out of the deck and placed larger bets when the count was in their favour.

Thorpe’s book encouraged many millions to play blackjack in casinos around the world but very few players actually mastered the art of counting, relative to the number of books sold.

However those who did master the game made a lot of money out of it and casinos either banned the players or changed the rules of the game to cut down on their advantage. This included shuffling the cards after every hand, restricting the maximum bet on each hand relative to the minimum bet, stopping multiple players or spectators placing bets on another player’s hand and playing with multiple decks rather than one or two decks, which had been the standard.

Further research and modelling was done by a variety of mathematicians, of who the most famous is perhaps Stanford Wong. He devised a method of playing blackjack which involved watching other people play and then betting on their hands when the count was hugely advantageous. This method of swooping at the right time is known as “Wonging” and is something casinos find almost impossible to beat.

Today blackjack can still be beaten but it is much harder than it used to be. Casinos that offer eight deck shoes, odds of 6 to 5 on blackjack and have electronic shuffling machines essentially have reduced the card counter’s advantage to zero. However even the most inexperienced player can improve their game considerably by following ‘basic strategy’ so that they reduce the house advantage on the game to as little as possible.