Heroes of our Time. What is the present situation in the sphere of war between the counters and players? Are there people to follow nowadays? Fortunately, despite great changes in the game itself and in the counteraction of casinos-players, blackjack is till alive and very popular. Thanks once again to Edward Thorp. Now we are living in Internet era. If Uston at his time was able to stand apart from the crowd only due to his self-spin off and publicity, now everyone can easily communicate with blackjack stars. Peter Griffin – is a great mathematician, blackjack theory developer, now the [ Read More ]
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 ]
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 ]
