Card Counting: History

Blackjack has always given the casino an advantage over the player by at least 5%. As time went by and strategies were developed, this advantage began to diminish, and the inverse became true with the birth of the card counter.

For many years, operating circles and casinos proposed blackjack tables to their customers, and the players did that which was expected of them: they lost their money.

The majority of losses were down to inexperience at the game of blackjack, the casinos ledgers were full of incoming cash, which, more often than not was being taken from people who did not even bother to learn the game. The majority of players believed blackjack to be a game of chance and ignored any strategies that would help them to optimise their game.

Therefore, during the early days, the casinos could also ignore the strategies of the game, simply because so few players ever tried to turn the probabilities of the game to their own advantage.

In the 1950's everything changed for the casinos; a key article by the mathematician, Roger Baldwin, of the United States, who worked out the best averages of the game from a mathematical point of view.

The result was the ‘base of blackjack' which indicated to the player if an action was mathematically profitable depending on the cards he held in relation to those cards belonging to the croupier. But, in spite of this new information, the advantage still favoured the house by 1%, an improvement, but not well enough.

During the 1960's another mathematical expert, Edward Thorp, realised that game of blackjack could, in actual fact, be tweaked to give the advantage to the player, if the player had an idea about which cards remained in the pack (the cards which remain to be dealt). Edward Thorp is now a famous name; he is the first man to write a method for card counting in his book ‘Beat the Dealer'.

A wind of fear began to blow in the direction of the casino owners; the master of the game of blackjack, from the date of the publication of the book, was now, without a doubt, the player.

When the casinos cottoned on they quickly attempted to make card counting impossibility by modifying the rules of traditional blackjack; the number of packs used in a game was increased, the method of shuffling and cutting the deck was changed, known specialists of the card counting techniques were banned from casinos.

The problem then became that the original blackjack players, who did not learn the card counting technique, started to get confuddled about the rules, and rather than learning the new game, they changed games entirely, playing craps or poker for example- but in the worst case scenario, players simply stopped visiting the casinos altogether.

Finally, in an attempt to seduce players back, the casinos re-established the original rules of the game and the players soon flocked back to them. The news then spread quickly and the new ‘card counting' players were feared by the casinos, but for the majority of casinos the blackjack players were still the novices and inexperienced players of the past, thus they continued to make money from these players, even though they still lost some to the card counters.

In the 1970's blackjack quickly came to surpass craps as the most popular table game played in casinos of that era...today the new blackjack is poker...but there is still money to be made from card counting.

Card Counting: Introduction. Card Counting: History. Card Counting:Is it Illegal? Card Counting: How is it Detected by Casinos? Card Counting: The MIT Team. Card Counting: An Informal Technique Card Counting: The Hi/Lo Technique Card Counting: The KO Tecnique Card Counting: Hi/Opt I & II Technique Card Counting: The True Count