The game of chemin de fer was introduced to the US in the 1800’s but it was not until the mid twentieth century that a system was created to defeat the house in Blackjack. This article is going to take a quick look at the development of that strategy, Counting Cards.
When betting was authorized in Nevada in ‘34, chemin de fer screamed into universal appeal and was most commonly gambled on with one or 2 decks. Roger Baldwin wrote a paper in 1956 which detailed how to reduce the house advantage built on odds and stats which was quite complicated for gamblers who were not mathematicians.
In ‘62, Dr. Thorp used an IBM 704 computer to better the mathematical strategy in Baldwin’s paper and also developed the 1st techniques for counting cards. Dr. Ed Thorp authored a tome called "Beat the Dealer" which detailed card counting strategies and the tactics for lowering the casino edge.
This spawned a huge increase in black jack gamblers at the US casinos who were trying to put into practice Dr. Ed Thorp’s tactics, much to the amazement of the casinos. The strategy was challenging to comprehend and hard to carry through and therefore improved the profits for the betting houses as more and more folks took to wagering on Blackjack.
However this large increase in earnings wasn’t to continue as the players became more highly developed and more accomplished and the system was further improved. In the 1980’s a bunch of students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology made counting cards a part of the regular vocabulary. Since then the casinos have introduced numerous methods to thwart players who count cards including but not limited to, more than one deck, shoes, constant shuffle machines, and speculation has it, complex computer programs to read actions and detect "cheaters". While not illegal being caught counting cards will get you barred from most if not all betting houses in sin city.
This entry was posted on January 31, 2010, 10:22 am and is filed under Blackjack. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.