STREETWISE BLACKJACK

Streetwise Blackjack

I'm Counting On You - How BJ Counting Really Started, Part I

By Peter Ruchman

Thinking of all the associations with the word count involved: Count of Monte Christo; Count Dracula; Psychotic Reaction by Count V; Count Basie (Count 'Em); "Counting On You" by Tom Petty, Arlan Day, Tom Jones and others; Count on Me by the Jefferson Starship Count by Debra Killings, Jasper Cameron; Count All your Fingers by Dorothy Olsen; Count Backwards From Four by Sister Goddamn; Count Basie Remembrance Suite by The Count Basie Orchestra with Frank Foster; Count Bill by Tony Scott; Count Down by Woody Herman; Count Down by Count Basie & His Orchestra; Count Down #1 and Count Down #2 by John Coltrane -Wilbur Harden; Count Down to Love by The Reflections; Count Every Star by Hugo Winterhalter; Count Everything by Timi Yuro; Count It All Joy by Bebe & Cece; Count Fleet; Mel Counts; Countdown; No count; Count Wutzke Avevne; Counters Way; Counterfeit; Count Five and Die; Count the Hours; Count Three and Pray; Count Your Blessings; Counterattack; Counterpoint; Counter Plot; Count Montefusco; Count Louis Antoine De Bougainville (1729-1811) one of the most famous French travelers; Count-Georges Louis Leclerc De Buffon(1707-1788), one of the greatest French scientists of the eighteenth century; Count Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813), famous French mathematician; Count Lew Nikolaivich Tolstoi, 1828-1910; Down for the Count; Counting CrowsŠ

I bring up these associations to make a point. Our culture has numerous references to "counting on" all types of things and ways. In the casino culture, there is the soft count room, the hard count room, the body count for hotel and show rooms, but most of all, there is card counting. It dominates like no other. If somebody were able to bottle all of the time, money, and effort put into this activity on both the casino and players' side, you would have a treasure trove of a self-contained genie and energy source.

It all began in the mid-1950s when four U.S. Army Technicians, (Roger R. Baldwin,Wilbur E. Canty, Herbert Maisel, and James P. McDermott,) combined to author an article which was printed in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. They had worked for three years with ordinary desk calculators to prove that the house edge in blackjack could fall as low as .0032. In popular mythology, the article was read by one Edward Thorp, a specialist in abstract functional analysis working at UCLA at the time. In 1958 Thorp became interested in how the laws of probability impacted the world of gambling. He and his wife Vivian were on vacation in Las Vegas where Thorp purchased 10 silver dollars and after about 45 minutes of play, carrying a small strategy card he had composed for the occasion, he lost his $10 playing blackjack. He was hooked.

Thorp went on to write the all time, best-selling gambling book ever published, Beat the Dealer. The first version came out in 1962. Currently in its nine-zillionth printing from the last 1966 edition, with a McDonald's-like "over 500,000 sold" blurb on the cover(last count was over 700,000 sold by the year 2000), the book paved the way for the enormous popularity that blackjack has gained over the years. It wasn't always this way.

Let me transport you back fifty years, 1950, to the downtown casinos of Las Vegas. I say downtown because at that time, Reno was the hot-spot of gambling in Nevada, the only state in the union permitting legal wagers. The Strip consisted of a grand total of three casinos: the El Rancho Vegas, The Last Frontier, and the Flamingo. That's it. If you were in Vegas, there was a lot more action at the Pioneer, the Northern, the Las Vegas Club, The Boulder Club, The Meadows, or any of the other old downtown joints. Binion's Horseshoe was a year away from opening its doors.

Craps was the game of choice for all the old-timers and men who had just returned from the European and Asian battlegrounds of World War II as well as those who served domestically. The old card game of faro was still popular as well. And off to the side, as a diversion for the wives and girlfriends of the gamblers, almost universally male, were a few blackjack tables as a concession to keep the women occupied while their husbands gambled. Blackjack and a few slot machines were offered to the ladies to while away the time. It was rare sight for a man to venture over to play blackjack at these tables, and if he did, he certainly took a lot of verbal abuse, questioned as to when he would return to the "real gambling" at the dice pit.

Now fast-forward to the present. Most contemporary casinos in both ailing downtown Las Vegas and the booming Strip, now boasting 34 major resort/hotel/casinos along with many smaller operations, contain floor plans that are far different than we saw in 1950. Slot machines and video poker machines dominate, with blackjack tables outnumbering all other tables games by a wide margin. Faro has gone the way of the apteryx and dodo birds, extinct exotic creatures, and there are usually one to three dice tables offered as a concession to the old-timers who discuss the game of craps in reverent terms usually reserved for Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. Things have gone topsy-turvy in the last half-century.

Thorp's suggestion that blackjack could be beaten by assigning a numerical system to certain cards, isolating and placing a higher value on some over others, altered the casino universe and ultimately, the American landscape. With Nevada the only state offering legalized gambling in 1950, right now, in 2000, you can legally gamble in 48 of 50 states.

It is all due to those four army strategists who influenced Edward Thorp, who wrote the book on how to beat blackjack. Thorp's book begat at casino revolution which reverberates today. Thorp's book gave the average person the idea and hope that blackjack was a beatable game; one the non-professional or advanced amateur could play and win. But it wasn't quite like the popular myth, partly created by Thorp, and embraced by the media, would have us believe. Information has come to light to suggest that it didn't happen quite the way we have believed in the past. Tune in next week to see for yourself in the second part of this series, "As the Cards TurnŠ"