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A short history of blackjack from the French game vingt-et-un to the modern day online blackjack sites. Find out more about online blackjack from this article.

The original game of blackjack was created in the 17th, in France and was initially called “vingt-et-un” (twenty-one in French). Other names of blackjack were 21, pontoon, and California aces. The original French version of blackjack required the player to draw a jack of spades followed by an ace of spades in order to win. This is where the term blackjack originates from, describing the essence of the game.

The French revolution has imported blackjack to the United States where it quickly became highly popular in casinos and gambling houses. Because blackjack involved both luck and skills to win the game was very popular among professional gamblers and serious players. But with the 1910 ban on gambling, the game was outlawed and forced to go underground. During this period blackjack was associated with mobsters and criminals.

The seemingly simple rules of blackjack have made it very popular and lead to numerous winning strategies and techniques to be developed. Today, blackjack is found in casinos all over the world and with the commercialization of the Internet numerous online blackjack sites offer playing the game right at your computer.

According to Richard Epstein, blackjack became popular during World War I, and was called “black-jack” from the practice of paying a bonus to a player who held an ace of spades with a jack of spades or clubs. John Scarne puts the year when this curious rule first appeared at 1912, when twenty-one tables appeared in horse-betting parlors in Evanston, Illinois. I believe Epstein’s information is taken from Scarne, and Scarne states that he discovered the origins of blackjack in America as a result of his private discussions with old-time gamblers, not from any published texts that can be looked up today.

I am skeptical of much of what Scarne has written about history of blackjack, so I’ll quote from Mickey MacDougall’s MacDougall on Dice and Cards, which was published prior to any of Scarne’s books: “Many professionals dress up the game by giving prizes for certain hands. A favorite stunt is to offer ten times the size of the wager to anyone holding a natural twenty-one with a black jack. This adds interest to the game, but it also tempts a player to increase his stakes.”

I would also assume that a gambling house that offered this bonus would be using any number of illegitimate methods to assure the house a healthy edge.

Thorp was keeping the casinos on the run.

Thorp also included a Simple Point Count in this new edition of his book, but at the time that strategy seemed way too simple to most players to gain much of an edge, or to be taken seriously by players who wanted to beat the game. Later, the power of Thorp’s simpler method of adjusting the running count, without keeping a separate count of the exact number of cards played, would be shown.

That curious bonus payout that gave blackjack its name, however, has long since disappeared. There may be some casino somewhere that pays a small bonus if a player is dealt a natural 21 which includes a jack of spades or clubs, but that is no longer a normal rule of the game. Today, a blackjack is simply any initial two cards that consist of an ace and any ten-valued card.

That’s when Ed Thorp dropped another bombshell. Under the auspices of their Vintage Paperback division, Random House published a revised and expanded edition of Beat the Dealer. And the most important addition was Harvey Dubner’s Hi-Lo counting system, which Thorp called the Complete Point Count, with a computer-optimized strategy devised by Julian Braun. To the casinos’ frustration, this was a system that could more easily be applied to multiple-deck games.

In 1975, Stanford Wong came out with Professional Blackjack. The casinos looked for card counters by watching for their betting spreads. It had never occurred to the casinos that a counter might be watching a table from the aisles, waiting for an advantageous count before jumping in to bet.

The counting system Wong published was the Hi-Lo Count, and like Revere’s count, used the easy divide-by-remaining-deck(s) approach to running count adjustments. Wong had a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, hence his pseudonym. As four-deck shoes were the most widely available games in Las Vegas by that time, this original approach was brilliant.

So, at last, some twelve years after one his friend had proposed the Hi-Lo count values, his system was available in a format both fully optimized with strategy indices, and presented with a simple methodology of play. This playing style has since become widely known as wonging.

In 1978, Resorts International opened in Atlantic City, the first legal East Coast casino in the twentieth century. Their four- and six-deck blackjack games offered a new form of surrender, dubbed by card counters as “early surrender,” since the casino allowed players to surrender half a bet even when the dealer showed an ace or 10 up, and before the dealer checked for a blackjack. This rule gave basic strategy players a small edge over the house right off the top, without any card counting whatsoever! And the advantage to card counters was even greater. And, ironically, Resorts International was soon the most profitable casino in history, winning an average of $450,000 per day. From opening day, card counters had a field day at Resorts’ tables. A team of professional blackjack players whose founders were from Czechoslovakia that had been playing in Las Vegas flew all of their members to Atlantic City to take advantage of this new surrender rule. Within a year, he had organized about twenty of his college and golfing buddies into a team of blackjack players. Hyland’s team continues to this day as one of the most successful casino gambling operations in history.

It was also in 1978 that the first MIT blackjack team was started. This team actually consisted of students from MIT, Harvard, and other East Coast colleges. Johnny C.j now a legendary player who joined the team in 1981, plays high-stakes blackjack to this day and continues organizing teams of professional players. College kids found that they could pool their money, play blackjack with a modicum of intelligence, and get rich quick.

In fact, it was a combination of that easy-to-beat early surrender game and Ken Uston’s The Big Player that had just been published in 1977 that worked together to create an environment where new teams of smart young kids could make millions playing blackjack.

Mistake: The most common mistake beginners make is to stand too often on their stiff hands (12,13,14,15, and 16). Players are naturally afraid to hit these hands because every one of them could bust (make a total of 22 or more) with a single hit. But when the dealer has a high card (7, 8, 9,10, or ace) showing, your best odds of winning come from hitting and giving yourself a chance of making a better total.

Some beginners think the best way to play is to play the same way the dealer plays: Hit all sixteens and stand on all seventeens. This is not true. The object of the game is not to make a hand as close to 21 as possible, but to beat the dealer. Often the best way to do this is to stand with a low total, sometimes as low as 12.

Tip: Here’s how many players think: If I hit this 14, I risk busting my hand right here and now. But maybe the dealer has a 6 in the hole. If I don’t take a hit, my hand still has a chance. Maybe the dealer’s hand will bust.

Every player is afraid that he will be responsible for his own loss. But that 14 you are holding is already in dire jeopardy when the dealer shows a 10 up. You must fight for the hand’s survival by taking the hit, giving it a chance of becoming a stronger hand against that 10. With a 14 against a 10, you must fight to the death.

On the other hand, if the dealer’s upcard is 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6, and you are holding a stiff hand, you should stand. Since the dealer must hit his stiff hands, and chance busting even when you are stiff, hitting your weak hands is not advantageous against these weak upcards.

Mistake: Some beginners think the best way to play is to play the same way the dealer plays: Hit all sixteens and stand on all seventeens. This is not true. The object of the game is not to make a hand as close to 21 as possible, but to beat the dealer. Often the best way to do this is to stand with a low total, sometimes as low as 12.

Tip: This is the basic logic of casino blackjack. There are exceptions to these guidelines, as the actual basic strategy decision for any given hand is determined by working out all of the mathematical probabilities. But if you just consider this logic when studying the basic strategy charts, the pattern will become clear to you and it should not be too difficult to memorize.

During the early 70th, Dr. Keith Taft began developing the first concealed blackjack computer, and by 1972, Keith had started using a computer in the Nevada casinos to play “perfect” blackjack. Nevada had no laws at that time prohibiting the use of devices at their tables. Keith’s first computer weighed fifteen pounds. He went on to develop dozens of concealable computers and other electronic devices over the next two decades, ever smaller and more powerful. By the mid-’70s, Keith and his son, Marty, had met Al Francesco, and they would be putting together teams of players using computers to beat the blackjack tables.

Here’s how it worked

In the toe of each shoe there were two “switches”, or buttons - one above each big toe and one beneath - for a total of four switches. Each switch conveyed a different code to the computer, which was a small epoxy-encased device that was strapped to the calf beneath the trousers. The computer itself was about the size of a pack of cigarettes, but thinner. By using a series of toe taps, kind of like Morse code, the player could relay to the computer everything it needed to know in order to make a decision in a blackjack game: which cards had already been dealt, what cards the player held, and the dealer’s upcard.

This computer communicated its decisions to the player with buzzes and taps on the sole of the player’s foot. It was not easy to use one of these devices. It essentially entailed learning to “type” with your big toes. Even once you had memorized the codes, inputting them via the toe switches was a chore. It took weeks or even months of practice to get to the point where you could use the device at casino-dealing speed without foot cramps stopping you.