The game of Blackjack was brought to the US in the 1800’s but it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that a strategy was created to defeat the house in chemin de fer. This article is going to take a quick peak at the creation of that strategy, Counting Cards.
When betting was legalized in the state of Nevada in 1934, chemin de fer sky-rocketed into recognition and was usually bet on with 1 or two decks of cards. Roger Baldwin published a dissertation in ‘56 which explained how to lower the casino advantage built on odds and statistics which was really complicated for players who weren’t math experts.
In ‘62, Dr. Thorp utilized an IBM 704 computer to better the mathematical strategy in Baldwin’s dissertation and also created the 1st card counting tactics. Dr. Thorp wrote a tome called "Beat the Dealer" which summarized card counting strategies and the practices for lowering the casino advantage.
This created a large increase in black jack players at the US betting houses who were attempting to implement Dr. Thorp’s techniques, much to the anxiety of the casinos. The strategy was hard to comprehend and difficult to implement and therefore elevated the earnings for the betting houses as more and more people took to gambling on Blackjack.
However this large growth in earnings was not to continue as the players became more refined and more educated and the system was further perfected. In the 80’s a group of students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology made counting cards a part of the day-to-day vocabulary. Since then the casinos have introduced countless measures to counteract players who count cards including (but not limited to), multiple decks, shoes, shuffle machines, and speculation has it, complex computer software to observe body language and detect "cheaters". While not illegal being discovered counting cards will get you banned from most if not all brick and mortar casinos in sin city.