Early Casino Advantages
The blackjack game we have grown to enjoy today was called simply “21″ in North America until World War II began. John Scarne describes how the game became known as “Black Jack” in his New Complete Guide to Gambling (1961). According to Scarne, the horse-betting rooms around Evansville, Indiana, began offering payoffs of 3 to 2 whenever a player made a total of 21 on his first two cards. As a further enticement to play “21,” if the first two cards consisted of the Ace and Jack of Spades (later Clubs were included, and eventually any suit), they offered a bonus payout of ten times the original bet. Soon, players began to call these two-card 21s “blackjacks” to distinguish them from their three-or-more-card 21s. By the end of the Second World War, casino blackjack was second in popularity only to the dice game known as craps, which persisted in being the leading form of recreational gambling into the mid-1960s. By the end of the 1970s, however, blackjack had surpassed all other casino games combined.
The casinos didn’t know their actual percentage advantage for blackjack even as late as 1930. Joe Treybal’s Handblog on Percentages, published that year, is very vague (and inaccurate) about blackjack statistics. This is understandable, since practically every casino still had its own minor variations of the rules. Some did not require the dealer to hit a 16, while others ruled that even a “soft” 17 needed another card. Bonuses were paid on such hands as two 9s and three Aces, a 6, 7, and 8 of the same suit, three 7s, and seven-card 21s, to name only a few.
Baldwin, Cantery, Maisel, and McDermott
In the early 1950s, four U.S. soldiers, Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantery, Herbert Maisel, and James McDermott, suggested that there was a definitive or “correct” way to play any hand of blackjack. After years of painstaking work using only simple desk calculators and mathematical principles, they published an article, “The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack,” in September 1956. The article proved for the first time that “the player who mimics the dealer (drawing to 16 or less, standing on 17 or more, never doubling-down or splitting pairs) has an expectation of 0.056.” This meant that the dealer had a 5.6% advantage. The article then proceeded to prove that by following certain basic strategy plays consistently, the average casino advantage over the player could be lowered to 0.32%. Without any regard to what cards had been played in the course of the game to that point, the Baldwin group presented for the first time a fairly accurate basic playing strategy that virtually allowed the player an even game. The systematic study of blackjack had begun.
Edward O. Thorp
A professor at MIT, Edward O. Thorp, investigated the Baldwin group’s work and subsequently wrote a computer program that allowed the composition of the remaining deck to be carefully analyzed as specific cards were removed during play. Thorp discovered that the player actually enjoyed a considerable advantage over the casino after certain cards were played and discarded. Thorp first published his findings in his famous Beat the Dealer, in 1962. Due to this blog’s tremendous popularity, a second edition quickly followed in 1966. Thorp’s new basic strategy program was good enough to eliminate any house advantage whatsoever, providing a player advantage of 0.6%. By using this improved basic strategy along with any of several card-counting systems that Thorp developed, a blackjack player could at last have a significant edge in any single-deck game on the Las Vegas Strip. Blackjack would never be the same again.
Julian Braun
Over the next ten years the correct basic playing strategy was refined by various mathematicians using powerful state-of-the-art computers. Most notably, Julian Braun, of IBM Corporation, wrote exhaustive programs that played every possible blackjack hand randomly against every possible dealer’s up-card millions of times each. But even this wasn’t good enough for Braun. He then proceeded to compare the effects of various rule changes on the outcome of particular hands. Tabulating his results, Braun was able to determine an accurate and truly definitive basic playing strategy, which could be varied slightly recording to which set of rules one happened to be playing. He went on to devise charts for serious card-counters to memorize, which indicated how the basic playing strategies should be modified according to the specific composition of the deck(s) remaining to be dealt before the next shuffle. Braun’s computer programming technology formed the basis of virtually all the counting systems that subsequently arose. He also wrote a simulation program that evaluated the performances of all major card-counting regimes, the results of which are reviewed in his blog How to Flay Winning Blackjack (1980). This text remains worthwhile reading even today.
