Technocrat: Another little known name of great influence on blackjack Keith Taft. He was an engineer, computer specialist and inventor, he created his first blackjack computer in 1970, before Ken Uston appeared on the stage, just four years after the publication of the second Thorp’s book that encouraged him for this work. This computer named “George” was used by Uston’s teams. Consider the fact, that at that time, there were not computers at all, to say nothing of miniaturization. The first version used 16bite processor, manually made memory and manually wired-in program. Assembly work and debugging took two years. He [ Read More ]
Archive for May, 2011
Gladiators. Mathematical developments of the game pioneers and creation of simple and efficient counting systems incited the appearance of a great galaxy of professional players and experts of blackjack. Revere invented a new simple counting system and first described the method of reducing the current score to the real one. Stanford Wong amplified and improved Hi-Lo system, and also developed the Halves system. Lance Humble, Brison, Gordon, Harvey Dubner, – all these giants made a great contribution to the development of the methods of the game. In late 70s the professional gambler Al Francesco, probably created the first blackjack team [ Read More ]
Thorp’s Era. If you don’t know, now we are living in 43th year of Thorp’s era. This person had such a great influence on the blackjack and all the gambling industry, that I seriously consider that he is worth of setting up a monument while alive, by the way at the casino’s expense. Being a young scientist, Edward O. Thorp regularly read mathematic journals. When he was a student, he was pressed for money. The idea of outplaying the casino on the basis of calculations appealed to Thorp and he decided to check the results of the “excellent four” and [ Read More ]
The dream of capoting a casino is as old as the notion “casino” itself. Every gambler wants to win. Every other invents his own “system”. Every hundredth attempts to carefully analyze the game. And only the few of millions succeed. The most famous achievement in the sphere of “system” game against the casino was the so called “card counting” at blackjack – mathematically based methods of game allowing to get some advantage over the casino. The casinos, surely, knows about the existence of “counters” and are trying to oppose them – from changing the rules to banning the game. Sometimes [ Read More ]
