Blackjack! That old famous bastard we all love and hate at the same time, but ...

Where are the roots of this game ???

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") or "veintiuno" on Spanish and has been played in the U.S. since the 1800's. Blackjack is named as such because if a player got a Jack of Spades and an Ace of Spades as the first two cards , the player was additionally remunerated.

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.

Professor Edward O. Thorp picked up where Baldwin and company left off. In 1962, Thorp refined their basic strategy and developed the first card counting techniques. He published his results in "Beat the Dealer", a book that became so popular that for a week in 1963 it was on the New York Times best seller list. The book also scared the hell out of the casinos.

Thorp wrote "Beat the Market" in 1967, in which he used mathematics and computer algorithms to find pricing inefficiencies between stocks and related securities.

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".

All in all, blackjack evolved to what you know today, different variations, changes, different decks and more makes Blackjack one of the most appealing and ever evolving games.

Mr.FeloBoay

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