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Legends of Blackjack
Honoring the achievements of the game’s pioneers
by Henry Tamburin
Many of today’s players have little or no knowledge of the history of blackjack, and no perspective of what came before. Therefore, this month and next I will recognize those individuals who have made major contributions to our knowledge of winning blackjack play. If it weren’t for them, the game of blackjack would be just another casino game with the odds stacked against the player, rather than a game that can be beaten by the skillful.
1950s
Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel, and James McDermott were mathematicians, often referred to as “The Four Horsemen,” who used hand calculators to develop and publish a reasonably accurate basic strategy for playing your hands. They proved that blackjack offered the best odds of winning, if players followed a specific set of rules. Their work was published in 1956 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association and later in the book, Winning Blackjack.
1960s
Ed Thorp—Thorp was the first to publish a method of winning at blackjack called “card counting.” He proved that the cards do have a “memory,” and that by tracking certain cards it’s possible to tell whether the deck is favorable or unfavorable to the player. Thorp published his theories, including his famous “Ten Count” card-counting system, in the 1962 classic book, Beat the Dealer, which became wildly popular and reaching the New York Times bestseller list. The casino industry panicked after the publication of the book and changed its playing rules, even though the Ten Count was too difficult for average players to master.
When players then boycotted the game, the casino industry reluctantly reinstated the original rules. It turned out that the publication of the book actually increased the popularity of blackjack and casino profits, because players flocked to the blackjack tables to play the “beatable” game (even though very few possessed the skills to actually do so). Not everyone, however, believed that card counting worked. John Scarne, who was a well-respected gambling expert and author during this time, publicly criticized Thorp’s “unbeatable winning blackjack system.”
Harvey Dubner—Dubner is credited with developing the practical point-count system that he called Hi-Lo, which was much simpler than Thorp’s Ten Count. The small cards from 2 through 6 were tagged “plus one,” the large cards (10s, picture cards, and Aces) were tagged “minus one,” and the neutral 7 through 9 cards were tagged “zero.” Players simply added the tags of each card as they were played.
The sum, known as the running count, told the player whether he had the advantage (positive running count ) and should bet more, or the house had the advantage (negative running count) in which case he should bet small. Dubner presented his point-count system in 1962 to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in Las Vegas. The Hi-Lo point-count system is still used by a majority of card counters today.
Julian Braun—Braun was the first to apply high-speed computers to the analysis of blackjack. Braun was a computer programmer for IBM and he had access to the fastest mainframe computers of that time. Braun tested and refined the original basic playing strategy. He also created the indices for the Hi-Lo counting system and published them in Thorp’s second edition of Beat the Dealer.
Braun also collaborated with Lance Humble to develop the Hi-Opt I and II card counting systems (published in 1980 in The World’s Greatest Blackjack Book), and with Lawrence Revere to develop more sophisticated counting systems that appeared in Revere’s book, Playing Blackjack as a Business. Braun’s only published book was How to Play Winning Blackjack, which contained the complete Hi-Lo counting system for single-and multiple-deck games.
Lawrence Revere (aka Leonard “Specs” Parsons and Griffith K. Owens)—Revere was a casino pit boss before he turned to playing blackjack professionally and teaching card counting to students. He developed and promoted several card counting systems including his Advanced Point Count (A.P.C.), which was one of the most popular counting systems used by professionals during this time.
In 1969, he published his classic book, Playing Blackjack as a Business, considered by many to be one of the best tutorials on how to win at blackjack. The book contained a series of simple-to-read-and-understand, color-coded strategy charts (the first of their kind), which made it easy for average players to learn the strategies.
Charles Einstein, Lance Humble, and Carl Cooper—The earlier counting systems of Thorp, Dubner, Revere, and Braun treated the ace as a high card. In 1968, Charles Einstein suggested treating the ace as zero, since for playing purposes, the ace acts like a low-value card. He also suggested keeping a separate count of the ratio of aces to non-aces, and recommended departures to the basic playing strategy based upon the count. Einstein’s concept was refined by Braun and later published in Lance Humble and Carl Cooper’s book, The World’s Greatest Blackjack Book.
Allan Wilson—Wilson published the first-of-its-kind study on “risk of ruin” in his classic book, The Casino Gambler’s Guide. Since then the important concepts of gambler’s ruin and risk of ruin for advantage blackjack players has been studied and refined most notably by Don Schlesinger, who made these and other formulas widely known when he published them in his book, Blackjack Attack.
 1970s
Peter Griffin—Griffin was a university professor who conducted detailed mathematical analyses of the game of blackjack. His book, The Theory of Blackjack, was first published in 1978 and has become the premier reference work on the mathematics of blackjack. He developed two factors that allowed an accurate comparison of a blackjack count system’s win rate: Betting Correlation (BC) and Playing Efficiency (PE). Griffin was also credited with being the first person to determine that the casino had an overall 2% advantage over a typical customer playing blackjack during that era.
John Gwynn—Gwynn was a university professor, computer programmer, and colleague of Peter Griffin, who conducted detailed computer studies of different aspects of the game with blackjack pioneers Griffin, Arnold Snyder, and Schlesinger. Gwynn is best known for his ambitious computer simulation, which he designed to unravel the great “Floating Advantage Debate,” in collaboration with Schlesinger, and for his “How True Is Your True Count?” study, conducted with Snyder.
Al Francesco—Francesco is the pioneer of blackjack team play, where teams of players pool their bankrolls and use various card-counting techniques to win large sums of money from casinos around the world. Francesco taught Uston how to count cards, and eventually joined one of Francesco’s blackjack teams and later exposed some of their secrets in his first book, The Big Player. Other teams have used this concept to win large amounts of money at blackjack, the most notable being a team of MIT students described in the best-selling book, Bringing Down the House.
 Ken Uston—Widely considered to be the most famous blackjack player of all time, Uston played professionally for high stakes over two decades, winning millions of dollars by utilizing a vast array of techniques including card counting, teams with “Big Players,” hole-card play, and concealed computer play.
He achieved celebrity status and appeared on several television shows, including 60 Minutes. He fought the casinos not only on the tables but in the courts to ensure the rights of card counters to play in Atlantic City. His book, Million Dollar Blackjack, is a classic on how to win at the game.
 Keith Taft—Taft invented the world’s first concealed blackjack microcomputer, a device about the size of a pack of cigarettes that a player could strap to his body and secretly use in the casino to play virtually perfectly (there were no laws back then that prohibited these devices).
Taft hooked up with Uston, who used the device in his team play (the computer was named “George”). They were eventually caught by the casinos and accused of using a cheating device. You can view Taft’s computer at the Blackjack Hall of Fame in the Barona Casino near San Diego.
Ian Andersen—Andersen was a high-stakes professional blackjack player. In 1976 he wrote the classic book, Turning the Tables on Las Vegas, which described in detail new techniques to allow card counters to disguise their skills from casino bosses. His sequel, Burning the Tables in Las Vegas, was published in 1999. He is famous for his “Ultimate Gambit,” which was a new approach to winning at blackjack that incorporated camouflage in playing, betting, and behavior decisions.
 Stanford Wong—Wong’s mathematical analyses of blackjack and his contributions to the game are legendary. His book, Professional Blackjack, is considered the bible for “wannabe” card counters. The book contained the first count indices for surrender, and strategies for games where the dealer stood on soft 17, as well as the level-3 Halves point count system. Wong’s computer program “Blackjack Analyzer” was one of the first commercially available software programs to study the game.
It’s been said that his website, www.bj21.com, contained the first Internet message boards in history. Wong also developed playing and betting techniques for blackjack tournaments, which he published in his landmark book, Casino Tournament Strategy. Another Wong book, Winning Without Counting, contained the first published non-counting techniques to beat the game of blackjack, while yet another, Basic Blackjack, contained the most comprehensive discussion of basic strategy. The term “Wonging” is used to designate a specific advantage-play technique. Wong has also published several newsletters on blackjack. The most famous, Current Blackjack News, is still being published.
Next month: The legendary blackjack pioneers of the 1980s - 2000s and their contributions.
Henry Tamburin is author of the best-selling book, Blackjack: Take The Money and Run, editor of the Blackjack Insider e-Newsletter, and Lead Instructor for the Golden Touch Blackjack course. For a free 3-month subscription to his blackjack newsletter with full membership privileges, visit www.bjinsider.com/free. For details on the Golden Touch Blackjack course visit www.goldentouchblackjack.com or call 866/WIN-BJ21. For a free copy of his casino gambling catalog featuring over 50 products call 888/353-3234 or visit the Internet store at www.smartgaming.com.
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