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History of Blackjack Advantage Systems Development
By Jerry Patterson
Part
I: The
Methods, The Men, The Myths and The Message
The Beginning
Although there are legends about old time blackjack players getting an edge
by "casing" the single deck, the modern history of blackjack advantage
system development starts in 1958 with the publication of the basic strategy
for playing the hands by Cantey, McDermott, Maisel and Baldwin. Initially published
in the American Journal of the American Statistical Association, it caused much
excitement among both gamblers and statisticians. I remember someone showing
me a dog-eared copy of the article, which I immediately copied and committed
to memory.
Then the four originators published their basic strategy, all their work done
on hand calculators, in a book called, I believe, Winning Blackjack, which has
now become an extremely hard-to-find collectors item. I wish I had saved my
copy. The original basic strategy published in this book is very close to that
which is in use today.
I was working in the Aerospace industry in 1958 when Winning Blackjack was published.
The book became the reason for frequent trips to Las Vegas. Myself and two or
three friends would meet at a rendezvous point in the San Fernando Valley, get
on the Hollywood Freeway, connect to the San Bernardino Freeway, stop in Barstow
for coffee, making the 296-mile drive in about six hours. Our first stop was
the Dunes where we would look for Ralph, our favorite dealer, and play single-deck
blackjack dealt to the bottom well into the night (remember this was before
Thorp's book). Our $100 bankroll was converted $20 at a time into real silver
dollars, which were the dollar chips of choice in those days, and we would grind
away with our $1-unit bets well into the night.
Playing almost even against the house as we were, we never lost much and actually
ended many trips money ahead. Our betting strategy was to increase our bet $1
on successive wins and hope for a winning streak.
Getting back to the publication of the basic strategy, it was the dawn of the
developmental work, which continues right up until this day. It started by sparking
an interest in Ed Thorp with his realization that blackjack is different from
roulette and craps because, unlike craps and roulette, the outcome of each hand
depends on prior events, i.e. which cards had been dealt and which cards remain
in the deck to be played. Statisticians use the words "independent trials"
and "dependent trials" to describe this phenomenon.
Development of a Blackjack Computer Model with Will Cantey & Herb Maisel
I accepted a position with a start-up company in 1961 and moved east to the
Washington D.C. suburban area. I was disappointed that my monthly trips to Vegas
would cease, but this was more than compensated by three individuals who became
friends and co-workers.
In the early days of the Cold War, lots of dollars were flowing from the Defense
Department into the private sector for military studies. The start-up firm secured
a lucrative contract with a joint Army/Air Force Task Force for the development
of a War Game Simulation Model.
Imagine my surprise on my second or third day of work when I learned that Will
Cantey and Herb Maisel were on the civilian staff of this agency (two of the
four developers of the original basic strategy). As we got to know each other,
another friend, Tony C., suggested an off-time project, using our collective
expertise on simulation models and computer programming, to develop a blackjack
simulation model.
Tony was the designer, I was the programmer and Will and Herb were the consultants.
Many long hours were spent after working hours on this project and we had a
lot of fun in deciding how to shape it and in formulating the studies we would
conduct with the working model.
My job was to write the program, initially just to play blackjack hands between
one player and a dealer using basic strategy. Once this was completed, the studies
we performed were concerned mainly with number of players in the game, rules
of play (we were fascinated by the liberal rules in the Pioneer Club such as
doubling down on any number of hands) and betting tactics and strategies.
The 709 Computer at this agency had open time on many night shifts, so we had
opportunities to "play" many 100,000-hand samples. About six hours
were required and the lights on the computer console would quit flashing to
make it appear that the computer was in an endless loop with nothing happening.
The first time we had to convince the operator to let it run and he was amazed
when end-of-job occurred at precisely the time we had predicted.
It is interesting to note that Cantey, Maisel and Tony were aware that blackjack
was a dependent trials game and that the odds of winning were affected by the
cards left in the deck. We came to this realization perhaps about the same time
Thorp did, but did not possess sufficient knowledge or motivation to see it
through to the development of a card counting system. Our computerized simulation
of blackjack would, however, be used in the future to provide independent verification
of Thorp's 10-count system.
The Thorp "Ten-count System"
Thorp was the first to exploit this idea of dependency. He devised a counting
system for beating the game and published it in his book Beat the Dealer in
1962. He called it the Ten-count System, and it was aimed at the single-deck
game, then standard in all Nevada casinos. It was extremely difficult to learn
and thus impractical for all but the most skilled players.
I have vivid memories of learning Thorp's Ten-count System. You had to keep
a running count of tens (10, J, Q, K) and "others" yet to be played
- an exact count, not an estimate. You started with two numbers for the single-deck
game - 36 and 16 - and you counted backwards from these two numbers as the cards
were played. This, then, gave you a running count of Tens and Others remaining
to be played. After each round you divided your count of remaining others by
the count of remaining tens to compute what we came to call the "Thorp
Ratio." This number gave the player an indication of his advantage; i.e.
if the Thorp Ratio was 2.0, e.g. 30 others and 15 tens remaining in the deck,
the player's advantage on the next hand was 1%.
Thorp presented a betting table for plugging the ratio into which yielded a
betting spread of from one to five units. After dividing others by tens and
rounding to two decimal places, e.g. getting a number like 1.57, you mentally
compared the resulting ratio with this table to find the proper range and thus
the correct bet size for the player advantage on the next hand.
This process was extremely difficult to apply in real world casino conditions
and Thorp, recognizing this in the second edition of his book, recommended that
a rough estimate, to within 0.1 or 0.2, would be satisfactory.
Nonetheless, Thorp and some early single-deck players he personally taught cleaned
up after the book was published in 1962 and forced the Nevada casinos to change
the rules of blackjack; e.g. restricting double downs to 11 only. The media
publicized this story in dramatic fashion and the book became a best seller.
Tens of thousands of new blackjack players bought Thorp's book to get in on
what they thought would be a "gravy train."
The casinos, realizing that the negative publicity was hurting their profit
margins, quickly restored the rule changes, but introduced more subtle changes
to thwart the legions of card counters who were invading Nevada to make their
fortunes.
Most gave up because of the demanding mental strain of keeping the two counts,
dividing or estimating the Thorp Ratio, and then making the mental comparison
to find the appropriate bet size. But the damage had been done and casinos introduced
two procedures which changed the game forever: (1) Shuffling the deck on suspected
card counters and (2) Introducing multi-decks and dealing blackjack from a shoe
instead of from the dealer's hands.
Next in this series on The History Of Blackjack Advantage Systems: The Forgotten
Man Of Blackjack.
*****************
Jerry
Patterson, a gambling instructor, author and player for 25 years, is author
of Casino Gambling: A Winner’s Guide to Blackjack, Craps, Roulette, Baccarat
and Casino Poker, the #1 selling gambling book on amazon.com and bn.com
since shortly after publication in February 2000.
You can purchase the book through the Books
section of AnteUp Gambling Links, by visiting Jerry’s Website Casino
Gambling Edge, or at bookstores nationwide.
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