The game of twenty-one was introduced to the United States of America in the 1800’s but it wasn’t until the mid 20th century that a technique was created to beat the house in twenty-one. This material is going to grab a swift look at the birth of that strategy, Card Counting.
When betting was legalized in the state of Nevada in 1934, black jack screamed into recognition and was usually played with 1 or two decks. Roger Baldwin wrote a dissertation in 1956 which explained how to reduce the house advantage based on probability and stats which was quite difficult to understand for gamblers who were not math experts.
In ‘62, Dr. Ed Thorp utilized an IBM 704 computer to advance the mathematical strategy in Baldwin’s paper and also developed the 1st techniques for counting cards. Dr. Ed Thorp authored a book called "Beat the Dealer" which outlined card counting strategies and the practices for lowering the casino advantage.
This spawned a huge growth in twenty-one competitors at the US betting houses who were trying to put into practice Dr. Ed Thorp’s tactics, much to the awe of the casinos. The technique was hard to understand and hard to execute and thusly increased the earnings for the casinos as more and more people took to gambling on twenty-one.
However this massive increase in earnings was not to continue as the players became more highly developed and more aware and the system was further perfected. In the 1980’s a bunch of students from MIT made counting cards a part of the regular vocabulary. Since then the casinos have introduced numerous measures to counteract players who count cards including (but not limited to), multiple decks, shoes, constant shuffle machines, and rumour has itnow sophisticated computer software to observe body language and identify "cheaters". While not prohibited being discovered counting cards will get you blocked from the majority of casinos in Las Vegas.
