Blackjack's Past

Playing cards are believed to have been invented in China sometime around 900 A.D. The Chinese are thought to have originated card games when they began shuffling paper money, which is an another Chinese invention, into various combinations. In China today, the general term for playing cards is "paper tickets". The contemporary 52 card deck used in the United States was originally referred to as the "French Pack" somewhere around the year 1600's. Later, the "French Pack" was adopted in England and than by the Americans.

The first accounts of gambling take place in 2300 B.C. or so, and the Chinese again get the credit. Gambling was very popular in Ancient Greece (even though it was illegal) and has been a part of the human experience ever since.

The history of the blackjack card game began in France and gets it�s roots from the games "chemin de fer" and "French Ferme". In the French casinos of the 1700 year it was played a similar game of the old "chemin de fer" and "French Ferme" but now, the game played it was called "vingt-et-un", which in english means twenty and one.

The game became known as Blackjack because if a player held a Jack of Spades and an Ace of Spades as the 1st two cards, the player was paid out extra. So with a Jack being a vital card and Spades being black, the game was called Blackjack.

After the French revolution, in the 1800's, blackjack hit the U.S. Gambling was legal in the western States from the 1850's to 1910, when the state of Nevada declared that gambling games and casinos are illegal. Later, in 1931 the same state re-legalized casino gambling and the game of blackjack became to be the most popular casino game and still is today. 1978 was the year casino gambling was legalized in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Since then, about 20 states have had a number of small time casinos sprout up. Nearly a hundred Native American Indian reservations operate or are building casinos as well.

In addition to the United States, countries operating casinos include France, England, Monaco (Monte Carlo of course) and quite a few in the Caribbean islands.

Blackjack was such a popular game because of the small edge that the casino has over the player and also because the game of blackjack is a game of skill in which if a player develops a good knowledge of the game, he can actually get an advantage over the casino. When mathematicians heard about this game they started to show interest in the game of blackjack. In 1956, Roger Baldwin published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association a paper called "The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack". Baldwin's article talked about how a player can play to reduce considerably the house advantage, but this it wasn't really the best strategy because they needed a computer to refine their system.

In 1962, professor Edward O. Thorp refined the basic strategy and developed the first card counting techniques. He published his results in "Beat the Dealer", a book that became so popular that for a week in 1963 it was on the New York Times best seller list.

Another major contributor in the history of blackjack is Julian Braun, who worked at IBM. His thousands of lines of computer code and hours of simulation on IBM mainframes resulted in the basic strategy, and a number of card counting techniques. His conclusions were used in a second edition of Beat the Dealer, and later in Lawrence Revere's 1977 book "Playing Blackjack as a Business".

Ken Uston used five computers that were built into the shoes of members of his playing team in 1977. Predictably, they won over a hundred thousand dollars in a very short time, but one of the computers was confiscated and sent to the FBI. The feds decided that the computer used public information on blackjack, and so was not a cheating device. Ken was also featured on a 1981 Sixty Minutes show and helped lead a successful legal challenge to prevent Atlantic City casinos from barring card counters.

Based on Thorpe's research, a set of moves known as basic strategy was developed and over the years modified by experts. This basic strategy made casinos to take countermeasures to control losses and for this reason, depending on what casino you are in you will find several variations in blackjack rules.