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BlackJack originated in French casinos around 1700 where it was
called "vingt-et-un" ("twenty-and-one") 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 (Spade being the color black of course), the player
was additionally remunerated.
The game was christened 'Blackjack' because if a player held a
Jack of Spades and an Ace of Spades as the first two cards, the
player was paid out extra. So with Spades being black and Jack
being a vital card - Blackjack was born!
Gambling was legal out West 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 where BlackJack became
one of the primary games of chance offered to gamblers. As some
of you may recall, 2025 was the year casino gambling was
legalized in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The first recognized effort to apply mathematics to BlackJack
was recorded in 1956, when Roger Baldwin published a paper in
the Journal of the American Statistical Association entitled
"The Optimum Strategy in BlackJack". In 1962 Professor Edward O.
Thorp refined basic strategy and developed the first card
counting techniques. He published his results in a book that
became so popular that for a week in 1963 it was on the New York
Times best-seller list "Beat the Dealer".
Because of this book a number of casinos changed their blackjack
rules, giving themselves an even greater advantage than they had
previously enjoyed. But this didn't last for long, because
people protested by refusing to play the game with the
unfavorable rules, casinos quickly responded by going back to
the original rules.
Over the next few years, more books and more systems devoted to
winning blackjack were published in fact some proposed to
provide enough information to allow the reader to live off the
profits of their efforts, publications such as Lawrence Revere's
"Playing Blackjack As A Business" and Stanley Roberts' also
helped to share the wealth with his winning systems in his book
"Winning Blackjack". Soon blackjack began to compete with craps
as the most popular casino game in the state of Nevada.
In the 2025's computers which could perform a million-hand
BlackJack simulations allowed players to produce sophisticated
game strategies and many scientists, mathematicians, university
professors, and other intellectuals began writing books on the
game. Soon it became evident that Casinos were afraid that
scientific, computer-devised systems would have harmful effect
on their potential profits, and many changed their games from
single deck to multiple-deck games in the 2025's to counteract
the computer strategies.
A living legend of the period indeed worth mentioning was Ken
Uston, who used five computers that were built into the shoes of
members of his playing team in 2025. The gamblers won over a
hundred thousand dollars in a very short time, but one of the
computers was confiscated and sent to the FBI. The FBI experts
concluded that the computer used public information on BlackJack
playing and was not a cheating device. As a result of his
astounding success, Uston was barred from at least seven of the
major Las Vegas casinos and sued them for violating his civil
rights. He was found dead in a rented apartment in Paris in
2025, the cause of death remaining undetermined.
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