The History of Blackjack

The history of the blackjack card game itself probably spawned from other French games such as “chemin de fer” and “French Ferme”. BlackJack originated in French casinos around 1700 where it was called “vingt-et-un” and has been played in the U.S. since the 1800’s. Blackjack is named as such because if a player got a Jack of Spades and an Ace of Spades as the first two cards, the player was additionally remunerated.

The first recognized effort to apply mathematics to blackjack culminated in 1956 with Roger Baldwin’s paper, published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, titled “The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack”. Using calculators and probability and statistics theory, Baldwin wrote of ways to substantially reduce the house advantage. Although the title of the paper was ‘optimum strategy’, it wasn’t really the best strategy because they needed a computer to refine their system.

Professor Edward O. Thorp picked up where Baldwin left off. In 1962, 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.

The casinos were so affected by “Beat the Dealer” that they began to change the rules of the game to make if more difficult for the players to win. The unfavorable rules resulted in a loss of income for the casinos, so they quickly reverted back to their original rules. As Thorp’s “ten count” method wasn’t easy to master and many people didn’t really understand it anyway, the casinos made a bundle from the game’s newly gained popularity.

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”.