Blackjack Tricks

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The card game of black jack was introduced to the United States in the 1800’s but it wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that a strategy was developed to defeat the house in twenty-one. This material is going to take a quick look at the birth of that strategy, Card Counting.

When casino gambling was authorized in Nevada in 1934, twenty-one sky-rocketed into recognition and was commonly gambled on with one or 2 decks. Roger Baldwin wrote a dissertation in ‘56 which described how to lower the house advantage founded on odds and stats which was very complicated for people who weren’t math experts.

In ‘62, Dr. Thorp used an IBM 704 computer to advance the mathematical strategy in Baldwin’s paper and also developed the first techniques for counting cards. Dr. Thorp authored a book called "Beat the Dealer" which detailed card counting strategies and the tactics for lowering the casino advantage.

This created a huge growth in twenty-one gamblers at the US casinos who were attempting to implement Dr. Ed Thorp’s tactics, much to the amazement of the casinos. The strategy was hard to comprehend and difficult to execute and therefore increased the profits for the casinos as more and more people took to playing Blackjack.

However this huge increase in profits was not to last as the players became more highly developed and more accomplished and the system was further refined. In the 80’s a bunch of students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology made card counting a part of the day-to-day vocabulary. Since then the casinos have introduced numerous measures to thwart card counters including but not limited to, multiple decks, shoes, shuffle machines, and speculation has itnow complex computer software to analyze actions and detect "cheaters". While not prohibited being discovered counting cards will get you barred from all casinos in sin city.