It doesn’t seem that anyone really knows for sure exactly where the game of blackjack originated. Some have hooked it up with the similar 18th and 19th century European games of “One-and-Thirty” and “Ving-et- Un.”
For sure though, the house-banked game of “21” began appearing in the gambling parlors of America around 1910 to 1920. Somewhere during that time, various houses decided to pay a bonus for a natural 21 made up of the ace of spades combined with any black jack. From this, the game eventually became known as “blackjack.”
With most casino games, it’s not that difficult for someone having a mathematical aptitude to determine how much percentage the house has in its favor. Roulette probably offers the simplest example. Since the wheel contains 38 slots with 18 reds, 18 blacks and 2 greens, you’ve got 20-to-18 odds against you whether you bet “red” or “black.” Every bet at the craps table can also be broken down and quantified in the same fashion if you lay out all the possibilities.
Now, what about blackjack? Actually, the same properties apply to the basic game. Problem is, there are hundreds of thousands of combinations and possibilities. In the early 1900s, about the best that mathematicians could do was take short cuts and make generalizations regarding the seemingly endless nuances that can develop in a hand. Where the house was concerned, that would be okay because after all, the player would be limited by his own reasoning powers. That being the case, just figuring the probabilities fairly close and structuring the rules along those assumptions was enough to give the casino a comfortable edge over any human of that era. And so it went for several decades.
1956: Then in the mid-1950s, four men named Baldwin, Cantey, Maisel and McDermott working as a team, spent several months using mechanical calculators to break down blackjack’s myriad card hand combinations. Even then, some of the more extreme nuances eluded them, but they still published the first known nearly perfect hand playing strategy for the game. Using this strategy, they determined that the house would have a mere 0.6% advantage over the player. This was a huge improvement over common strategies that were used up to then, and the foursome’s strategy did include lots of plays that were either considered silly or were just plain never thought about.
ENTER THE AGE OF COMPUTERS
1962: In the early 60s, a mathematics professor from MIT named Edward O. Thorp had the brainstorm that if you kept track of the cards as they were eliminated, you could improve your chances to win at the game. Employing the services of a brilliant computer guru at IBM Corp. named Julian Braun, they first checked and refined the “basic playing strategy” developed by its four founders. After making a handful of adjustments, they were able to reduce the house edge at blackjack to less than 0.1% — essentially an even game.
Thorp reasoned, and rightfully so, that if he could start out playing the game as a virtual “coin flip,” then keeping track of the cards should give him a definite advantage. Perceptively, he realized that because the dealer and player don’t really abide by quite the same rules, then high cards help the player and low cards help the dealer. Using this as his cornerstone, Thorp developed a method for tracking the dispersion of high cards vs. low cards. His game plan was utterly simple and just as beautiful. He would simply bet much more money when lots of high cards remained in the deck.
Before Thorp showed up on the blackjack scene, countless system players tried to beat the game every which way. Legend has it that a few people did, but such an overwhelming majority failed that casino operators considered blackjack to be basically “unbeatable.” So when Thorp came along with his “card counting system,” casinos welcomed him with open arms.
Understand now, that in those days the game was dealt with a single deck of cards. To boot, the deck was dealt right down to the last card. If a round was in progress when the cards ran out, many houses had the policy of leaving the hands right on the table, shuffling the remaining cards and finishing the hands with the newly shuffled partial deck. That left the door open to several profitable forms of “end play” that are now gone forever from casino blackjack.
Anyway, as time went on it became obvious that Thorp was on to something that actually worked. This card counting thing, which tracked high cards vs. low cards was indeed the real deal. So in 1964, the casinos got together and decided to protect themselves from Thorp and other “Thorp wouldbees” by altering the rules of the game. Doubling down would be allowed on 11 only, not on 10, or 9, or 8, or any soft hand for that matter. Pair splitting was still allowed, but not on a pair of aces. This all added about a full percent to the house edge.
As it turned out, this protective maneuver did more harm than good. Typical blackjack customers, nearly all losers, were miffed to find that the one casino game which was finally exposed as beatable had undergone significant punitive restructuring. Just when new hoards of gamblers were rushing to the blackjack tables with euphoric optimism, they were being told they could no longer do this, or weren’t permitted to do that.
Believing that, “they won’t let you win,” customers began to shy away and blackjack business fell off substantially. Within a month or so, the rule changes were dropped and the original rules reinstated. Amidst all the hoopla, Thorp published what has become a landmark book for casino blackjack, “Beat the Dealer,” which is still on the bookstore shelves today. It chronicled his blackjack adventures and laid out in detail the rudiments of card counting. The game of casino blackjack had truly seen a new day. These tumultuous times were just the beginning of the extensive metamorphosis that blackjack would go through over the next few decades.
1968: By the mid to late 1960s, casinos had figured out that several decks of cards shuffled together would be harder to keep track of than just a single deck. As a result, four-deck shoes began appearing on the blackjack scene and soon became more prevalent than hand held single or double-deck games. Furthermore, these “shoe” games would deal out only three of the four decks, then shuffle. Just when an expert counter’s information would become most useful, the shoe would be over.
Technically speaking, counting down four decks is hardly any more demanding, and not a problem for anybody who was able to count a single deck. The player’s running total merely had to be kept in mind for a longer period of time. There was however, a serious drawback to playing blackjack with 208 cards rather than only 52, aside from the fact that the last deck of cards would never be dealt.
You see, in order for the player to gain the upper hand at blackjack, the remaining composition of undealt cards must get skewed to the high side. The more excess high cards in the pack, the greater the edge for the player. At all other times, the house would maintain its advantage.
Comparing blackjack with one deck of cards to four decks is much like a comparison of flipping 10 coins in the air vs. 40 coins. If you flipped 10 coins in the air and needed 60% heads to gain an advantage, you’d get the 6 or more needed heads 37% of the time. But if you flipped 40 coins into the air, you’d get 24 or more heads only 13% of the time (24 heads out of 40 coins = 60%). The more coins you flip into the air, the closer to a 50-50 split the resulting heads and tails will be. As a consequence, card counters will have the advantage a smaller percentage of the time when more decks are used, and when advantages do come, they will be smaller.
There is a way out of this conundrum however, albeit an undesirable one. When a card counter finally does find himself with an advantageous shoe, he simply has to bet a higher multiple of his original starting bet. Instead of betting from say, $25 to $75 in a single deck game, he may now need to bet from $10 to $100 in a shoe game to make up for fewer advantageous shoes. Nevertheless, although a wider betting spread solves the mathematical dilemma, it brings about two other undesirable side effects. First, it raises the card counter’s volatility since swings will become greater and more painful to contend with. Secondly, it also raises a red flag to the pit that this player is betting in an unusual way, which in turn will often lead to close scrutiny.
1975: In the 1970s another major name in blackjack annals rose to prominence. Ken Uston popularized the “team” approach to beating the game. If wide betting spreads for high stakes would attract undesirable scrutiny from the pit, then why not play only when you have the advantage and make roughly the same size bets all the time?
The teams Ken Uston played on would send four or five “spotters” to different blackjack tables who would all bet the table minimum. Their sole job was to count down the shoes looking for a “positive” count. When one arose, that spotter would signal in the “big player” who would be waiting in the wings. The “BP” would come into the game from nowhere, pick up the count via signals from that particular spotter and simply bet $1,000 or $2,000 per hand until the shoe ended — or the count dropped into disadvantageous territory.
This worked like a charm for some time and made Uston and his teammates a lot of money. Eventually though, casino personnel and agents began to notice that some of the same people were repeatedly at tables where Uston would show up making huge wagers. Then, one night at the Sands in Las Vegas, Uston and the team were hauled into a back office, read the Nevada State Trespass Act stating that they were being barred from the premises, and released.
Like Thorp, Uston published chronicles of his blackjack escapades in three well-known books, “Million Dollar Blackjack,” “The Big Player” and “One-Third of a Shoe.” These books spawned many other blackjack teams, some of which still operate today.
1980: Less than 20 years after the blackjack revolution began, another man known as Stanford Wong (not his real name) published a book entitled, “Professional Blackjack.” Wong’s textbook presented oodles of strategic blackjack information, including what is arguably the strongest counting system ever developed for the mortal human mind, the Wong Halves Count.
Still, it was a different little piece of strategy that was Wong’s hallmark contribution to the blackjack community. You see, by the 1980s six-deck shoes had pretty much become the benchmark standard for casino blackjack. With six decks, the player would have the advantage even less often than with a four-deck shoe. The flip side is, when a six-deck advantage does present itself, it will usually last pretty long. Likewise, if the count has gone into the tank, it’s not likely to become favorable before the shuffle.
Wong cleverly reasoned that the best way to play these six-deck games was to “backcount,” or watch a new shoe from the aisle while counting to see if it would turn “positive.” If it did, the player could jump in and bet multiple units right from the get-go. If not, he could move on down the line and repeat the same effort at another table that was just starting a fresh shoe.
The second half of the Wong strategy was to leave a table where the count would go distinctly bad since it would likely last the rest of the shoe. Using this modus operandi, the player could gain a meaningful advantage using only a 1-to-3 or 1-to-4 unit spread. So logical and useful were these two strategies that they eventually became known in blackjack circles as “Wonging in” and “Wonging out.”
It wasn’t long however, before the casinos countered with their fabled “No-Mid-Shoe-Entry” signs. These would permit players to enter a game only at the very beginning of a shoe. Ironically, most poor blackjack players believed the house graciously installed these signs to prohibit new players from jumping in and “corrupting” the “sacred” order of the cards. Casinos like to capitalize on this folly, and often ask chronic losers if they’d like a No-Mid-Shoe sign.
1995: In an effort to insulate themselves further from card counters, some casinos were now dealing with eight-deck shoes. Through it all, blackjack continued to grow in popularity due to its reputation of being a “skill” game that can be beaten, and indeed some players were systematically beating it. So the casino industry fired back with the “continuous shuffling machine.”
It was a tall black dealing shoe that spit cards out at the bottom front to be dealt. After the hand, the dealer would drop the discards into another slot at the top rear. Inside was a constantly rotating conveyor belt which blended the just dealt cards with the fresh cards inside. With this method, it would theoretically be possible for the players to receive some of the same cards that had just been dealt on the last round. Thus, no cards were ever really eliminated and card counting would be virtually useless.
Continuous shufflers made a rather wide appearance on casino floors in the mid to late ‘90s. The average player however, just didn’t like them. Logically, they saw it as an attempt by the casino to preclude the skilled player from having a decent chance to win. Superstitiously, they believed it stopped the player from having “lucky” runs. As a result, continuous shufflers in general have fallen out of favor and are sparsely used today.
2004: While you’re playing blackjack, a floorperson will repeatedly come by and enter information, either on a card or into a computer as to how much you’re betting. They also record the time of day you sit down and the time you leave. From this they get an “average bet” and length of play with which to determine the amount of your comp. If you’re a large bettor, these comps can pay for your entire trip.
There’s also something else this information can tell the pit, but only if it’s interpreted astutely. It can tell them the amount of your minimum and maximum wagers. Most typical players won’t vary the size of their bets more than perhaps from 1-to-4 units. A card counter however, needs quite a bit more than that. If a floorperson is paying attention he will notice erratic betting patterns, but if he’s busy or lax, or if the counter is adept at camouflaging his betting spread, it’ll probably just slip by.
Now there’s something called RFID casino gaming chips (radio frequency identification). They’re very expensive and few casinos use them, but these chips actually have tiny radio frequency devices imbedded inside. When coupled with electronic receptors beneath the betting circle of the table, it will tell the house exactly how much you’re betting on each individual hand and exactly how much you’re winning or losing. If you’re just an average player looking to get a comp, they’re great. If you’re a card counter trying to maintain a low profile, they’re a problem.
There is even talk of RFID playing cards on the horizon that will register every card that has been dealt thus far. Using RFID chips with RFID cards, it would be possible for the casino to know at what particular count each different size bet was made, and whether that player is playing blackjack with an advantage or not. Alas, in this 21st century, Big Brother is breathing down the neck of skillful blackjack players everywhere.
