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HISTORY OF THE BLACKJACK

Playing cards are believed to have been invented in China sometime around 900 A.D. The Chinese are thought to have originated card games when they began shuffling paper money (another Chinese invention) into various combinations. In China today, the general term for playing cards means "paper tickets". The contemporary 52 card deck used in the United States was originally referred to as the "French Pack" (circa 1600's) which was later adopted by the English and subsequently the Americans.

The first accounts of gambling take place in 2300 B.C. or so, and the Chinese again get the credit. Gambling was very popular in Ancient Greece (even though it was illegal) and has been a part of the human experience ever since.

The history of the blackjack card game itself 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" 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.

Gambling was legal in the western States from the 1850's to 1910, at which time Nevada made it a felony to operate a gambling game. In 1931, Nevada re-legalized casino gambling, and blackjack became one of the primary games of chance offered to gamblers. 1978 was the year casino gambling was legalized in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Since then, about 20 states have had a number of small time casinos sprout up. Nearly a hundred Native American Indian reservations operate or are building casinos as well.

In addition to the United States, countries operating casinos include France, England, Monaco (Monte Carlo of course) and quite a few in the Caribbean islands.

The first recognized effort to apply mathematics to blackjack culminated in 1956 with Roger Baldwin's paper, published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, titled "The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack". Using calculators and probability and statistics theory, Baldwin wrote of ways to substantially reduce the house advantage. Although the title of the paper was 'optimum strategy', it wasn't really the best strategy because they needed a computer to refine their system.

Professor Edward O. Thorp picked up where Baldwin left off. In 1962, Thorp refined the 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 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. The unfavorable rules resulted in a loss of income for the casinos, so they quickly reverted back to their 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.

Another major contributor in the history of blackjack is Julian Braun, who worked at IBM. His thousands of lines of computer code and hours of simulation on IBM mainframes resulted in the basic strategy, and a number of card counting techniques. His conclusions were used in a second edition of Beat the Dealer, and later in Lawrence Revere's 1977 book "Playing BlackJack as a Business".

Ken Uston used five computers that were built into the shoes of members of his playing team in 1977. Predictably, 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, and so was not a cheating device. 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.


Origins Blackjack was first played in France before the start of the 18th century, where it was originally called vingt et un, twenty-one, and is believed to have evolved from other popular French card games of the period such as chemin-de-fer. The blackjack game's popularity spread to the rest of Europe and by the early 18th century had reached the USA.

The Name The name originated from an early big payout hand consisting of the ace of spades and the jack of clubs which was know as Blackjack, the name stuck although the improved payout for the hand disappeared long ago.

Popularity The game remained popular as it is an easy game to learn and play, and the player had some control over their fate. Blackjack's popularity continued to increase with the legalization of gambling in parts of the USA in the 1930s, but it was in the 1960s that it saw a surge in popularity.

Analysis This was due to mathematicians and statisticians becoming interested in the game and analyzing the odds for getting combinations of cards. Various books were published showing gamblers how to play the game and increase their edge against the house. These strategies were improved even further as the availability of computing power grew and the statisticians were able to simulate thousands of hands and develop what has today become the blackjack basic strategy.

Card Counting Part of the blackjack strategy that was developed involved card counting which enabled the intelligent player to increase and decrease bets when the count showed that the deck was favoring them or not.

Today Casinos did their best to hamper the "counters" by increasing the number of decks and introducing more frequent shuffling. However these changes have done nothing to affect the popularity of blackjack and it remains the most played table game in casinos to today either onland or at the ever increasing online casinos.



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Basic poker tournaments Rules and Information of Variants of poker tournaments games. Popular online casinos poker science has changed its concept to bring you the best choice in online online casinos poker games to your home! The history of the game of Blackjack began around the beginning of the 18th century in France, where it appeared in the form of a game called "vingt et un" or "twenty one". The name "Blackjack" comes from an early version of the game in which the player received a payoff of 10 to 1 if he had a black jack of spades and a (black) ace of spades.

From France, Blackjack made its way to the United States in the 19th century, where it was mainly found out in the American West. In 1931, gambling became legal in Las Vegas, and Blackjack became one of the staples of the new casino scene.

In the 1950's and 1960's, books were published that used mathematical analysis to teach players how to improve their odds of beating the dealer. One of these books, Dr. Edward Thorp's "Beat the Dealer" became a bestseller, and Blackjack became the most popular casino game in the United States.

In the 1970's, Ken Uston and his merry band of creative gamblers used hidden computers to win hundreds of thousands of dollars. Their ingenuity attracted the attention of the FBI, which examined the computers and decided that they were not cheating devices, and therefore were fair and legal. Players rushed to apply the lessons of Uston's method, but many casinos decided to adopt a multi-deck system of play, which complicated methods to improve the player's chances. Uston himself was banned from several Las Vegas casinos and was eventually found dead in a Paris apartment in 1987. But the game lives on, and prospers in almost every self-respecting casino, traditional or online.

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