STREETWISE Blackjack

Not Fade Away: An Appreciation of Julian Braun (19?-2000), Part I

What, then, is the right way of living?
Life must be lived as play, playing certain games,
making sacrifices, singing and dancing,
and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods,
and defend himself against his enemies,
and win the contest.
Plato

If you care at all about the game of Blackjack, take a moment and bow your head. Julian Braun has died. He had been ill for some time and passed September 4, 2000. It is odd but fitting this information is just coming to light. Both Howard Schwartz and I started inquiring about Braun's health months ago, coincidently around the time he left us. We asked the luminaries of the Blackjack world -- no one had any information about this very private, reclusive individual. Stanford Wong, Arnold Synder, Lance Humble, Edward Thorp and Don Schlesinger along with others were pressed into service -- no one had a clue. Gambler's Book Shop's co-founder, Edna Luckman had a phone conversation with him about a year and a half ago. He called from his Chicago apartment, recently moved, sounding tired of life, explaining he was ill. Their friendship went back decades. After that, silence.

The irony is this man whose work affected so many lives went so quietly, unnoticed by the world, and his admirers. Sure, he was not a public personality, given to accepting accolades for his outstanding discoveries. Nor was he prone to calling attention to himself, particularly in his later years. In fact, he was something of a loner. But there are reasons.

For those of you unfamiliar with him, permit me to illuminate you. Julian Braun was a scientist, an explorer, theoretician, philosopher, and friend to every Blackjack player who walks this earth. He was the author of a total of one book -- "How to Play Winning Blackjack," sadly, long out-of-print. But what a book! Printed under his name, was the legend, "World's Most Respected Authority." In this age of supreme meaningless trite hyperbole, it's easy to disregard this claim as just more b.s. Trust me on this -- it wasn't. Read on.

The man had few peers. Some may have first encountered his name in "Beat the Dealer" (second edition) or Lawrence Revere's "Playing Blackjack as a Business" -- these two books form the foundation, a dynamic duo My Weekly Reader, and We Look and See, teaching us the rudimentaries of Blackjack.

Knowing how to figure the odds
will not make a winning player.
But a total disregard of the odds
for a long period will surely make a loser.
Lucky players don't last.
A. D. Livingston

Thorp has been widely celebrated as the father of card counting and thus modern Blackjack. While the role of others in this fascinating development has long been overlooked, he was the man who made the public breakthrough, and the world responded. But it was the work of Julian Braun who quantified the game into trustworthy, reliable numbers eliciting strategies, heretofore elusive. Julian Braun was working for International Business Machines (IBM), beginning with that company in 1961, and was intrigued by Blackjack. Having first visited Las Vegas in 1958, a small player himself, he was all too aware of the pitfalls lying in every gambler's path to the window.

In the beginning, everything was even money.
Mike Caro

In order to truly comprehend Braun's monumental achievement, you need to remember prior to the 1962 publication of Thorp's book, Blackjack was relegated to a casino corner. It was an afterthought, a game primarily for the wives and girlfriends of the regular casino customer -- the World War II and Korean War veterans who comprised the bulk of the crowd. These men were craps players -- Blackjack tables were placed in the casino for the amusement of a primarily female assemblage, the game deemed unworthy of a real gambler.

Then Thorp's book was published and all hell broke loose. Gamblers adopted it, national publicity was given to the "gambling math professor from MIT" and a new generation pored through the pages of "Beat the Dealer." The book offered new-found hope there was a certifiable way to beat Blackjack, employing a lot more than sheer luck, even hitting the New York Times bestseller list in 1963. "Beat the Dealer" came complete with a set of strategy cards, the first time anyone had quantified a set pattern of responses to the possibilities one might stumble upon playing the game.

It was within this framework Braun took aim. He sought to examine the value of Thorp's math, then, when he saw problem areas or incorrect results, refine the suggested strategies to make the odds more favorable for the player. It was not unlike two 16th Century cartographers compounding each others discoveries, reshaping the world, outlining, measuring, detailing general boundaries then redefining the topography once again. These were two explorer/mapmakers who changed the world.

Braun wrote Thorp explaining his interest requesting Thorp mail a copy of his computer program, which Thorp did. The FORTRAN program came with no documentation leaving Braun to break the code and figure it out for himself, which he accomplished.

Braun took Thorp's strategies and ran them through an IBM 7044 mainframe computer -- 9,000,000,000 times. Again, hearken back to when computers were gargantuan gleaming steel edifices of wires, tubes, shelves, cabinets and wheels, taking up entire rooms, using painstakingly slow punched cards, running at speeds that would make a contemporary computer geek want to commit suicide. Today's average PC can accomplish 100 times the task in a split second, like comparing a tricycle to a full-bore chopped Harley.

In the revised version of "Beat the Dealer," Thorp wrote, "Braun's detailed Blackjack calculations, based on his extensions and refinements of my original computer program, are the most accurate in existence, and he has kindly allowed them to be used throughout this revised edition."

Beating them three weeks in a row in Las Vegas
is like going into the lion's den and coming out
with meat under both arms.
Larry Merchant

Using available technology, Braun was able to simplify and condense Blackjack play into a "Basic Strategy." The result of his work first came to light in the 1966 2d edition of Thorp's book. In the four years between his initial book and its revision, Braun had reworked Thorp's math. In his acknowledgements, Thorp wrote, "The results of the first edition have been sharpened and improved by the extensive researches of Julian Braun of the IBM corporation. He has made most of the calculations for the point-count method and has made numerous detailed and valuable suggestions. I am grateful to him for allowing his work to be incorporated into the second edition."

(To be continued next week)