The card game of Blackjack was brought to the US in the 1800’s but it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that a strategy was created to beat the casino in twenty-one. This material is going to grab a quick look at the creation of that technique, Counting Cards.
When betting was approved in Nevada in ‘34, twenty-one sky-rocketed into universal appeal and was most commonly bet on with 1 or 2 decks of cards. Roger Baldwin published a paper in ‘56 which described how to reduce the house advantage founded on probability and stats which was quite difficult to understand for people who weren’t mathematicians.
In ‘62, Dr. Edward O. Thorp used an IBM 704 computer to better the mathematical strategy in Baldwin’s paper and also developed the 1st tactics for card counting. Dr. Ed Thorp authored a book called "Beat the Dealer" which summarized card counting techniques and the tactics for reducing the house edge.
This spawned a large growth in Blackjack gamblers at the US casinos who were attempting to put into practice Dr. Ed Thorp’s strategies, much to the alarm of the casinos. The system was challenging to understand and hard to execute and thusly elevated the profits for the casinos as more and more people took to playing twenty-one.
However this huge increase in profits wasn’t to last as the gamblers became more refined and more insightful and the system was further improved. In the 1980’s a bunch of students from MIT made counting cards a part of the regular vernacular. Since then the casinos have brought in numerous measures to counteract players who count cards including, multiple decks, shoes, shuffle machines, and rumour has itnow sophisticated computer software to analyze body language and detect "cheaters". While not illegal being caught counting cards will get you blocked from most if not all brick and mortar casinos in sin city.