Blackjack Insurance: Is it a Sucker Bet?

By Arnold Snyder
(From Casino Player, May 1997)
© Arnold Snyder 1997

Question from a Player:  My problem is that I have this feeling that I’m taking insurance far too often. I lose this bet a lot, even though I only take insurance when my true count is +3 or more. (I’m playing mostly in six-deck games in Mississippi and Louisiana.)

On my last trip, I put in 19 hours at the tables over a three day period. I kept track of all my insurance bets. I took insurance 14 times, won 5 times and lost 9 times. I realize this is a very short test from the statistical point of view (I’ve been reading your column for years!), but my experience on all of my trips is similar to this. I lose the insurance bet way more than I win it. This is just the one trip where I kept track of my results.

What’s worse, when I win the bet, I don’t really win anything, I just break even on my hand. Winning is actually more like pushing. When I lose the insurance bet, however, I not only lose the insurance, but I still have to play the hand against a dealer ace, which also often loses. I’m starting to think this insurance bet is just a sucker bet for card counters.

Blackjack Insurance: A Side Bet, Nothing More

Answer:  Many players are confused about the way insurance works because, in casino jargon, you are “insuring your hand.” Insurance is a side bet, and has nothing to do with the results of your blackjack hand.You are simply betting that the dealer has a ten in the hole. If he does, you win 2-to-1. It is not a “push” for your hand.

For example, you have a $100 bet on the table. You have a 16 vs. a dealer ace. Let’s say the insurance bet does not exist. The dealer peeks at his hole card, flips over a ten, and you lose your $100.

Now, assume insurance is offered. You have a true count of +5, so you put out $50 for insurance. Now, when the dealer flips over his ten, he pays your $50 insurance bet at 2-to-1 ($100), but you still lose your hand, so you break even.

Since, without the insurance bet, you would have been minus $100, this $50 bet gained you $100.

The actual result on your blackjack hand will be exactly the same regardless of whether or not you take insurance. If, for example, the dealer has a blackjack, you lose; if not, then you have to play out your hand vs. whatever he does have.

Also, your analysis of your blackjack insurance results indicates that you did pretty close to what you would expect as a card counter. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say all of your insurance bets were $50 each. Since you lost 9 times, this is a $450 loss; since you won 5 times (at 2-to-1), this is a $500 win. So, you’re $50 ahead of where you would have been had you never taken insurance.Technically, your fourteen $50 insurance bets would total $700 in action. A $50 win total on $700 action would mean that insurance has paid you at the rate of 6.67% — which is more likely a positive fluctuation in your favor than a negative one.

Remember, if you win your insurance bet just half as often as you lose it, you break even. So, it will always seem like you lose this bet more than you win it, even when you are making money on it.  ♠

…and Chew Gum at the Same Time (Tips on Counting Technique)

By Kyle Sever
(From Blackjack Forum, Vol. XXI #2, Summer 2001)
© 2001 Blackjack Forum

[Note from Arnold Snyder: This truly is a terrific collection of tips on how to learn to count cards. One of the things I like best about Kyle’s tips is that they not only make you a good card counter, but they will also help to prepare you for advanced techniques for beating blackjack, like hole-carding.]

One of the most important fundamentals in blackjack is the utilization of proper card counting technique. Trouble is, I have never seen an explanation on how to do so.

It’s not uncommon for an author to say that once you can count down a deck in less than twenty-five seconds, you’re about ready for the casino, but lack of proper card counting technique can hinder your development as a card counter and/or get you into bad habits. It will not only slow down your counting, but will limit your ability to use more advanced methods of advantage play and cover.

Technique for Visualizing the Count

One of the most common card counting errors is maintaining the count by repeating it in the head. Assuming the player is using the hi-lo, when he or she sees a five, immediately +1 should go into the head. However, many players will literally talk to themselves and say “plus one” or perhaps “one” in their heads. In negative counts, this type of player needs to say something in addition to the number to indicate it’s negative, such as “minus one” or “m-one.” If someone doesn’t like negatives I would bet money it’s due to poor technique.

Instead of maintaining the count by repeating the number in your head, it’s advisable to visualize it and keep it visually in front of you as if it was stuck there with glue. When visualizing the number, don’t picture it on the table or anything external; then you would be focusing your eyes on only one spot. Instead, visualize it in your head. As new cards come across the table, the visualized number should be changing in your mind. When you are waiting between rounds, instead of repeating the count, the number should be held in place as if you had eyes in the back of your head.

When applying this technique, the number in your head shouldn’t change after each individual card that you proceed to see. You should generally take in multiple cards at once and after counting the group, the number should change. This method is faster and easier since many cards cancel out. The exception is when there is a potential bust card, since if the player busts the dealer will place the cards from the busted hand immediately into the discard tray.

Card Counting Tecnique and Talking

One of the best things about counting visually is that it will greatly facilitate the skill of counting and talking simultaneously. If you are saying the count in your head and someone tries to start up a conversation, you will have problems maintaining both the inner voice and outer voice. It is best to use just one voice and use another form of memory, visualization.

I can recall only one personal resource on how to count and talk the same time but was disappointed by the explanation. One noted blackjack author and web host had a short article that explained how someone could maintain the count using physical means, such as counting with your hands, fingers or chips so the counter could keep the count while talking.

I have two problems with this method of counting cards. First, it presupposes that you would be counting using auditory methods. Instead of focusing on how to count with good technique, the author was showing how to minimize the effects of counting with poor technique. Second, it can look conspicuous.

Card Counting Practice Technique

Once you begin to get the basic visualization technique down, it will take time to increase your speed. When counting cards, focus only on relevant information. Once your eyes pick up enough information to obtain the value of the card(s), don’t focus on it any more. If your eyes see a gob of paint, it’s a ten. You really shouldn’t care if it is a king, queen, jack or a ten. If you use the Hi-Lo, and you see a few spots on the card, then poof, it is +1. You don’t care if it is a three or four, heart, spade, etc. Just be careful not to count the ace as +1.

If you see a moderate amount of paint (7, 8, 9), the count would be 0. Your eyes should be like a camera, taking shots and quickly processing the information. Your camera doesn’t need to take multiple pictures of the same item.

One reason multi-level systems are more difficult is that it takes longer to discern the properly assigned number to a card. When using a higher level system such as Brh-1, which assigns a +3 value to the five, your camera must zoom in, and it forces you to look more specifically at the number of spots on the card or the number in the index. A one level system, on the other hand, requires you only to look and see if there is a low to medium density of pips on the card.

In order to facilitate recognition of cards, I recommend that you practice without the index and focus on the pips. If you use a regular deck of cards, white out the indexes of the whole deck, or at a minimum, do it to all non-face cards. Another way to efface the indexes is with a hole-punch, or simply tear them. If you have a computer you can use Smart Cards or Casino Verite and practice with them. Learning to count this way is especially helpful when back-counting. When far away from the table it’s not easy to identify the index but it’s usually feasible to see the rest of the card.

When initially learning to count and talk the same time, don’t jump into a full-blown conversation. Sit at home and say a one-syllable word and hold it out loud. Just say something like “Woooooooonnggg.” While holding the word, try counting. Try to keep the sound of it as consistent as possible. Although doing this will make you sound like an opera singer, it’s a good exercise to learn to talk while counting. (Sorry Arnold, even though you’re a bishop, I don’t recommend blackjack players worship you while practicing due to your name!)

If you are having trouble doing this task then I recommend you soften your voice. I don’t recommend you practice by talking in intervals because this may lead you to do most of your counting when not talking and/or when your voice is attenuated. Eventually, variation in speech should increase and you should be able to talk continuously.

Being able to count and talk the same time is important but it’s just as important to count and listen at the same time. Try listening to the radio or listen to the television while counting and try to comprehend what is being said. Once you reach this level of proficiency, you will feel confident if someone in the casino wants to strike up a conversation. Once again, if you rely on auditory counting you may find yourself struggling to distinguish between what two voices are telling you.

Practice with different IRC’s (initial running counts). If you don’t like negatives then try starting the count at –10. Exaggerate the practice. It’s analogous to a baseball player loosening up by swinging two bats. If you can learn to handle difficult situations then when it comes to game time, it should be easier.

I highly advise the use of a computer program to facilitate practice. With a computer, your practice sessions will be more efficient since all it takes is a click of the button to pick the cards up. Two of best practice programs currently out on the market are Casino Verite by Norman Wattenburger and Smart Cards by Richard Reid. Casino Verite has long been accepted as THE program to imitate real world casino play. Its superb graphics, attention to detail and number of options can make you feel like you are playing at any number of games around the world. However, the very nature of what makes the program great is also its downfall.

I don’t feel Casino Verite is the best choice for newer players or for those really trying to improve their skills. The process of learning to count cards must be broken down into different drills. Although Casino Verite does have some drills, they are limited in scope. The software was designed, first and foremost, to imitate casino play and not for counting training or practice.

To improve your counting skills, I recommend Smart Cards by Extreme Blackjack. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t any software like it. It seeks to improve the most fundamental skill in all of blackjack: counting.

It has a number of ways to let the user practice and drill along with multiple ways of distributing the cards. The variety of count settings is important since it will train you to recognize cards quickly without setting you within a rigid method of counting. A rigid method of counting is when you start at the same direction and count in the same order each time. The drills in Smart Cards will train your eyes to move in different directions.

Once you start to master counting, I would then consider the purchase of Casino Verite. I think of it as card counting maintenance software. It gives you a chance to use your index numbers, betting spread, and card counting skills all at one time and, by occasionally practicing on it, you can maintain your counting skills once you have gotten your system down. Now if Extreme Blackjack would only put a playing module in Smart Cards…

Newcomers often wonder how fast they should be able to count before they are ready for the casino. There is no easy answer to this. In fact, I used to spend too much time counting down decks and not enough time playing hands. I could count down a deck by hand in 15 seconds, yet had problems when I tried to play hands against the computer.

My advice would be to first count down decks until you can do so without the voice in your head and do it in 20 seconds by hand or 15 seconds by computer program. Once you can do this, try doing the same while talking. Once you get this far, don’t worry about making the card counting Olympics. Go play some hands and stick with that, occasionally going back to count down decks. Consider doing this even more if you are gonna do some back-counting. Once you count down a deck quickly and play your hands while talking and listening to someone else, then you’re about ready to tackle the casinos.

If you do decide that you want to get your speed as fast as possible, remember that no matter how much you work at it, there is a limit to what you can do. One blackjack author has said that it’s possible for some magicians to riffle through a deck and memorize the entire deck sequence in a matter of a couple seconds. I would certainly think that a magician could do it since such a feat would make a decent magic trick! In fact, the current world record for memorizing the order of cards in an entire deck is thirty-four seconds, a record set by Andi Bell in 2000.

Overall, your counting will be very slow at first since you are re-training your brain. But eventually, your counting speed will exceed what you were able to do before. In fact, after many years’ experience, some counters don’t even try to count at all and they find that they know the count. You may find yourself counting cards inadvertently if you are just watching a game of blackjack for the fun of it.

Tips on Card Counting Systems

Another advantage of counting visually is that it will be easier to handle more complex systems. If you have wondered how some people manage multiple counts at once, they don’t usually repeat the count in their heads. It’s much easier to handle multiple pieces of information by visual means.

If you don’t intend to learn a multi-parameter system, but would like to upgrade to a higher level system such as UBZ II or Brh-1, then you will find that visualization will help you master the increased complexity. Although good technique will improve your ability to handle more intricate systems, I’m not necessarily advising you to change counts. The greatest benefit will be speed of play and cover, including the ability to count and talk the same time.

Card Counting Technique in the Casino

I don’t recommend getting into a routine when counting cards in a casino. Any type of fixation can be bad for cover and counting order is no exception. Many card counters count in the same fashion round after round.

For example, a common way people count a face up game is to start at the right and follow the deal counting each new card they see. However, you may not want to start at the right all the time in this type of situation. Depending on how you are acting with the other players, and your seating position, it’s sometimes best to count by starting at the left.

For example, if your attention was focused for a second on something that was going on West of the table (for example, a boss points out something special in the casino), it would be easiest and look most natural to count the cards at 3rd base first. Counting in different ways will give you flexibility at the table that will minimize the amount of energy you use. You must be able to adapt your counting to what you are doing outside of counting the cards.

The best example of how flexibility earns $$ is when back-counting more than one table. When doing this, you can’t spend too much time counting one table, especially when both tables are in sync, that is, when the actions of the two dealers correlate. Your eyes must go back and forth.

Card Counting Technique: Conclusion

There are several advantages in using visualization and good technique at the blackjack tables. The greatest plus will be cover and speed of play. You will focus on the count using less energy and your brain won’t be buzzing as much after a long day at the casinos. Your speed of play will increase and you will be able to count and talk the same time. Perhaps you will even consider changing to a more powerful card counting system. In the end, this all means more $$ in your pockets.

I wish you all good luck in your card counting training. Before long you may be counting cards like Peter Griffin, using Hi-Opt I with all five side-counts! ♠

A Banking Team for Player-Banked Blackjack

By Arnold Snyder
(From Card Player , April 1994)
© 1994 Arnold Snyder

Question from a Reader:  Some of the Indian reservations here in Northern California now offer player-banked blackjack. Table limits go up to $100 at one such casino, and $200 at another, at least on the few visits that I’ve made to these places. Most players bet in the $5-25 range most of the time, even when the table limit is higher, but still it takes a pretty healthy bankroll to bank one of these games. I’ve seen dealers bust a few times in a row at a crowded table, breaking a bank in a few minutes, just by minor bad luck.

There are not many card counters at these tables, and much of the blackjack play is pretty atrocious by Nevada standards. I have taken to banking these games fairly regularly, and with great success. I must admit, however, that the bankroll swings are enormous. I’ve had more than one losing night, though I most certainly win most of the times I’ve banked.

Here’s my question: I have been talking to some friends who are card counters about combining bankrolls with me to go after these games with a “team” approach. In other words, if four of us would each put up $5,000, we could play off of a $20,000 combined bankroll.

It seems to me that if we were each banking a different table, we could play off of the common team bank with all of the positive aspects of blackjack team play. We would get into the long run faster. One player’s losses would likely be hedged by the other players’ wins, etc. Is my thinking right on this? In a sense, a well-financed banking team would almost be like being a casino ourselves! Am I right?

Answer Regarding Blackjack Banking Teams

Yes, you most certainly are right. Playing off of a common bank should cut your short term risk and flatten the wild fluctuations you’ve been experiencing.

Your scheme to “take over” the tables is very similar to what some teams of professional players did in Arizona a few years ago when “social” gambling in bars was legalized. The Arizona bar gambling, unfortunately, became quite overrun with cheats on both sides of the table, primarily due to a complete lack of gaming controls.

My understanding of these California Indian reservation casinos, with player banked blackjack, is that the games are somewhat more regulated, and more closely monitored by the casino personnel, than were the Arizona bar games.

But be careful. Anytime you gamble with large amounts of cash in relatively loose blackjack games, controlled more by players than by casino personnel, professional cheats will be tempted to get in on the action. Be especially careful if players are allowed to handle their cards, or if dealers are allowed to use varying dealing procedures.

Also, if you are offering limits of $100-200 per hand on blackjack games you are banking, your suggested $20,000 bankroll could prove to be too small if a lot of players decide to play table limits. As long as most players are betting in that $5-25 range, with a smattering of larger bets, you shouldn’t have a problem affording the negative fluctuations. One table full of high rollers, however, could put you out of business in no time flat, just due to normal fluctuation. ♠

The Blackjack Hall of Fame Honors Professional Gamblers

© 2005-2012 Blackjack Forum Online

After taking stock of my life, I find my most valuable acquisition
is the wisdom I’ve learned through gambling.

— N. M. “Junior” Moore, The Crossroader

[Note: This is the article about the Blackjack Hall of Fame published in BJFO in 2012. Since then, other Hall of Famers have been added. I will update this article following the 2022 Blackjack Ball. – A.S.]

In the Winter of 2002 a diverse selection of 21 blackjack experts, authors, and professional players were nominated by the top professional gamblers in the world to the Blackjack Hall of Fame. Voting for the Blackjack Hall of Fame was open to the public for about a month on the Internet, and the final voting was completed at the 2003 Blackjack Ball in January, an event open only to the top professional players.

The primary voting for the Blackjack Hall of Fame is done by professional players. There are two reasons for this. First, the founders realized that professional players are the only ones who know the full accomplishments, at and away from the tables, of people who are professional blackjack players. That is because many of these achievements must be hidden from the public in order to protect sensitive information from reaching the casinos.

Second, the founders felt that it is professional players, whose survival depends on such knowledge, who know best which authors and theories have truly been original and truly had the greatest impact on the game, especially on players’ ability to win at the tables.

The Seven Original Inductees into the Blackjack Hall of Fame

There was a remarkable concurrence between the voting of the public and professional players on the original seven inductees to the Blackjack Hall of Fame.

The seven original inductees to the Blackjack Hall of Fame (in alphabetical order) were: Al Francesco, Peter Griffin, Tommy Hyland, Arnold Snyder, Edward O. Thorp, Ken Uston and Stanford Wong.

You may be familiar with some of these names. (Knowledgeable card counters are familiar with all of them.) Griffin, Snyder, Thorp, Uston, and Wong are primarily known to the public through their research and writings on blackjack. Francesco and Hyland are primarily known to professional players (and casino game protection personnel!) for their relentless and highly successful team attacks on the casinos.

Subsequent Inductees into the Blackjack Hall of Fame

The following year, at the 2004 Blackjack Ball, two more inductees were added, again with primary voting done by professional gamblers at the Ball. The two added members: Keith Taft, a brilliant inventor who has spent more than two decades milking the casino blackjack games with his high-tech electronic devices, and author Max Rubin, known for his book on milking high-value casino comps, Comp City, as well as his work on developing some of the highest-edge blackjack team plays.

At the 2005 Blackjack Ball, Julian Braun and Lawrence Revere were inducted, and in 2006 professional gambler James Grosjean was elected to the Blackjack Hall of Fame. In 2007, Johnny Chang was elected, and in 2008 Roger Baldwin, Will Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott, also known as The Four Horsemen of Aberdeen, were elected for their pioneering work in developing the first accurate blackjack basic strategy. You will find more information about each of the Hall of Fame members below.

Recent inductees include: Richard W. Munchkin (2009), Darryl Purpose (2010), Zeljko Ranogajec (2011), and Ian Anderson, 2012. Richard Munchkin and Darryl Purpose have logged many years as high-stakes players around the world, including with several of the great blackjack teams. They have made money at blackjack using virtually every form of advantage play ever invented, and they were part of the development of several high-edge methods. Darryl Purpose began with the Ken Uston team, and was known as the fastest card counter in the world. Richard Munchkin is the author of Gambling Wizards.

Zeljko Ranogajec ran the most sophisticated and profitable blackjack teams in Australia and continues to deploy his teams in innovative plays in casinos around the world. Ian Anderson is a high-stakes player and author of Turning the Tables on Las Vegas , an esteemed work among professional blackjack players as the first work to seriously address card counting camouflage, and how to get away with high-stakes play long term. (Anderson also wrote a guide for lower-stakes players, titled Burning the Tables in Las Vegas.)

Nomination of candidates has now become the permanent responsibility of the members of the Blackjack Hall of Fame. Every year, the current Hall of Fame memberrs submit names of possible candidates to each other, with biographical information and reasons for consideration. No limitations are placed on the number of names that can be submitted in this initial part of the process. All seven members then vote on their top seven choices, with all members’ votes counting equally. Each member’s votes are provided to all other members to insure the integrity of the process.

The purpose of the Blackjack Hall of Fame is twofold: to honor people of exceptional accomplishment in this field, and to educate the public about the creativity, intelligence, drive, and courage of great players whose achievements at the tables have largely been hidden from the public. The rules for public voting require that the biographies of the nominees be posted wherever the voting takes place.

Last year (2003), the Barona Casino actually created the physical Hall of Fame, similar to the Binion’s Horseshoe’s “Wall of Fame” for great poker players. Each inductee has a plaque with his photo and a few words about his contributions and accomplishments. There is also a museum of cheating devices. There are marked cards, computer shoes, “hold-out” gizmos for card-switching, and all kinds of cool stuff.

An interesting side note: the Barona Casino, which is sponsoring the Blackjack Hall of Fame, has awarded to each inductee a permanent lifetime comp for full room, food, and beverage in exchange for each member’s agreement never to play on Barona’s tables. Arnold Snyder says: “I must admit that this membership and lifetime comp is definitely the strangest thing I’ve ever won from a casino. I’ve been thinking of calling around the casinos of Vegas to see if I can get similar terms.”

In any case, let’s look at the eleven current Blackjack Hall of Fame members, and explain why they were chosen by professional players for this honor.

Members of the Blackjack Hall of Fame and their Achievements

Julian Braun

Julian Braun died in 2000 and his only book, How to Play Winning Blackjack, is long out of print and a collector’s item. For ten years in the early days of card counting, he did a vast amount of the computer work for some of the top authors.

He did the programming for the 2nd edition of E.O. Thorp’s Beat the Dealer . His programs were used to develop all of Lawrence Revere’s systems, as well as the Hi-Opt systems. Of the “pre-Stanford Wong” professional players (the pros playing before the first edition of Wong’s Professional Blackjack came out in 1975), most were using either Thorp’s Ten Count, Thorp’s Hi-Lo, Hi-Opt I, Hi-Opt II, Revere’s Point Count, Revere’s +/-, or Revere’s Advanced Point Count. These were the most popular and widely disseminated systems in use for about ten years, and Julian Braun’s programs were used to develop all of them.

See Arnold Snyder’s Interview with Julian Braun in the Blackjack Forum Gambling Library.

John Chang

John Chang has been known by casinos and the public for over 20 years as manager of the MIT blackjack team, which has won many millions of dollars from casinos in Las Vegas and around the world using a variety of card-counting and other professional gambling techniques, many of them first analyzed and pioneered by John.

John remains active as a professional gambler, and many other professional players continue to use his analysis and innovations to beat blackjack and other casino games, so we’re going to have to wait a few more years to tell you the best stuff about John Chang’s career and accomplishments.

For more information on John Chang and the MIT blackjack team, see The MIT Blackjack Team: Interview with Team Manager Johnny C.

The Four Horsemen of Aberdeen: Roger Baldwin, Will Cantey, James McDermott and Herbert Maisel

The “Four Horsemen of Aberdeen”” (Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott) were inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame in 2008 by the unanimous decision of the current living members of the Hall of Fame, including (alphabetically) Johnny Chang, Al Francesco, James Grosjean, Tommy Hyland, Max Rubin, Arnold Snyder, Edward O. Thorp, and Stanford Wong.

The Four Horsemen were inducted for their pioneering work in publishing, in 1956, the first accurate basic strategy for the game of blackjack. The strategy was first published in an article in the Journal of the American Statistical Association; later the strategy was published for a mass audience in the 1957 book Playing Blackjack to Win .

Ed Thorp credits Baldwin, Cantey, Maisel and McDermott with being the impetus for his own research into the game. The four mathematicians provided Thorp with all of their data in 1958, which ultimately led to the publication of Thorp’s Beat the Dealer in 1962.

Although the Four Horsemen did not realize it at the time, the strategy they published in 1957, which also included the first legitimate card-counting system, was the first published blackjack strategy to provide a player advantage over the house with a flat bet. Recent computer simulation carried out by ETFan at Blackjack Forum Online, using the PowerSim blackjack simulation software, shows that the strategy provided a player edge of 0.1%.

One of the particularly impressive things about the Four Horsemen’s accomplishment was that they determined an accurate basic strategy using only desk calculators (or what used to be commonly called “adding machines”), as they began their work while in the Army in 1953, and computers were not available to them at that time. Although the game of blackjack had been played in casinos for 200 years, and although all of the other common casino-banked games had been mathematically analyzed by this time, blackjack had not been analyzed because all of the experts agreed that the game was simply too complicated.

Although the Four Horsemen were never widely known by the public, blackjack aficionados and professional players have always revered the four mathematicians as legends.

Here are a few comments about the Four Horsemen from the members of the Blackjack Hall of Fame:

James Grosjean: “I must have heard a thousand different players tell someone at a blackjack table ‘The book says this’ or “The book says that.’ These guys are the book.”

Johnny Chang: “When I first read the 1957 article they wrote that appeared in the Journal of the American Statistical Association with an accurate basic strategy, I couldn’t fathom how they had accomplished this using desk calculators. It just seemed impossible.”

Al Francesco: “Without these guys, none of us would even be here.”

Cardoza Publishing has published a 50th anniversary edition of the Four Horsemen’s Playing Blackjack to Win , along with interviews and other historical information about these men who changed blackjack history. Arnold Snyder has provided an Introduction for the book, and Ed Thorp has written the Foreword, in which he states: “To paraphrase Isaac Newton, if I have seen farther than others it is because I stood on the shoulders of four giants.”

For more information on Roger Baldwin, Will Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott, see The Four Horsemen and the First Accurate Blackjack Basic Stragegy .

Al Francesco

Al is one of the most highly respected blackjack players in the history of the game. This is the guy who literally invented team play at blackjack and taught Ken Uston how to count cards. Ken once said to Arnold Snyder: “I owe everything to Al. He really might be the greatest blackjack player there ever was, and he’s also a real gentleman.”

Al is primarily known to the general public through Ken Uston’s books as the mastermind who created the “big player” (BP) team concept. Al started his first blackjack team in the early 1970s, and until Uston’s first book, The Big Player, was published in 1977, Al’s teams were completely invisible to the casinos and extracted millions of dollars from them.

Virtually all of the most successful blackjack teams that came after The Big Player was published—the Hyland team, the MIT team, the Czech team, the Greeks—used Al’s BP concept to disguise their attacks, and that approach is still being employed profitably by teams today.

Al is known by professional players for his highly inventive approaches to beating the casinos, though many of his methods cannot yet be written about because they are still in use by players. See RWM’s Gambling Wizards: Interview with Al Francesco in the Blackjack Forum Gambling Library.

Peter Griffin

Peter was the math genius who first proposed using the mathematical “shortcuts” developed by statisticians for estimating answers to highly complex problems to analyze and compare blackjack card counting systems. He was the first to break down the potential gains available from any card counting method to two prime factors: the Betting Correlation (BC) and the Playing Efficiency (PE).

These two parameters facilitated highly accurate estimation of any system’s potential win rate in any game using any betting spread, without extensive computer simulations. He described how these methods could be used to evaluate the differences between single-level and multi-level counting systems, as well as the value of using multi-parameter methods (keeping more than one count). This book was a milestone for system researchers, developers and players, the most important analysis of card counting systems since Thorp’s Beat the Dealer.

Blackjack researchers have been using Griffin’s methods ever since. Any proposed counting system, regardless of its level of simplicity or complexity, can quickly be broken down to its BC and PE, and its comparative value to other systems and methods can be determined.

Over a period spanning 20 years, Griffin published dozens of technical papers in mathematical journals and at academic conferences, all gambling related. Even in his most technical writing, wit and off-the-cuff quips are the hallmarks of his style.

Griffin authored two books: The Theory of Blackjack (1978, revised many times since, published by Huntington Press), and Extra Stuff: Gambling Ramblings (1991).

Peter Griffin died in 1998 at the age of 61.

See Peter Griffin’s article, “Self-Styled Experts Take a Bath in Reno”, in the Blackjack Forum Gambling Library.

James Grosjean

James Grosjean started playing blackjack professionally while a graduate student in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. He happened to spot his first dealer hole card at a Three Card Poker game not long after, began running original analyses of how best to play the opportunity, and never looked back.

James Grosjean is the author of the professional hole-carder’s bible, Beyond Counting, which established for the first time the accurate edge and playing strategy for a number of hole carding plays and other professional gambling techniques. Grosjean has also worked with Keith Taft on a blackjack computer that was used in a casino situation where computer play was legal. Keith Taft, another member of the Blackjack Hall of Fame, called James Grosjean’s programming “brilliant.”

Like Tommy Hyland, James Grosjean has taken on serious legal battles with the casinos to establish the legal right to play with an advantage. After suffering false arrest at Caesars and Imperial Palace, he successfully sued both casinos and the Griffin Detective Agency. In fact, James Grosjean’s lawsuit was directly responsible for bankrupting the Griffin Agency and stopping them from libeling other professional gamblers.

See James Grosjean’s articles in the Blackjack Forum Professional Gambling Library for more information. Grosjean’s articles include: CTR-Averse Betting, 42.08%, Scavenger Blackjack, Beyond Coupons, It’s Not Paranoia If…”, and A Funny Thing Happened On My Way To The Forum.

Tommy Hyland

Tommy started playing blackjack professionally in 1978 while still in college. That was also the year he started his first informal blackjack team. He’s never looked back. For more than 25 years, he has been running the longest-lasting and most successful blackjack team in the history of the game.

Tommy Hyland and his teammates have played in casinos all over the US, Canada, and the world. He has used big player techniques, concealed computers (when they were legal), and had one of the most successful “ace location” teams ever. He has personally been barred, back-roomed, hand-cuffed, arrested, and even threatened with murder at gun-point by a casino owner he had beaten at the tables.

Every year, the Hyland team players take millions of dollars out of the casinos. And even though Tommy has had his name and photo published in the notorious Griffin books more times than any other player in history, he continues to play and beat the games wherever legal blackjack games are offered. He has also fought for players’ rights by battling the casinos in the courts.

Despite his fearsome reputation, Tommy is polite, soft-spoken, and always a gentleman. He is as loved by players as he is hated by the casinos. In an interview conducted by Richard Munchkin in 2001, Tommy said: “If someone told me I could make $10 million a year working for a casino, I wouldn’t even consider it. It wouldn’t take me five minutes to turn it down… I don’t like casinos. I don’t like how they ruin people’s lives. I don’t think the employment they provide is a worthwhile thing for those people. They’re taking people that could be contributing to society and making them do a job that has no redeeming social value.”

Read RWM’s Gambling Wizards: Interview with Tommy Hyland in the Blackjack Forum Gambling Library.

Lawrence Revere

Lawrence Revere was both an author and a serious player. He died in 1977. His only book, Playing Blackjack as a Business , initially published in 1969, is still in print. If you ever look at the “true count” methods being employed pre-Revere, you will understand why Revere was inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame.

The card-counting methods in use prior to Revere’s book were cumbersome and mentally fatiguing to use. In the second edition of Beat the Dealer, in which Thorp first proposed the Hi-Lo Count, he mentioned a simplified method of using the count, though he never developed it as a full system. Revere had a leap of brilliance that led him to come to the conclusion that the simplified method of obtaining a “true count” that Thorp had mentioned could be fully developed and employed with the most powerful of point count systems.

Revere’s method was so simple compared to the alternatives, that it has been employed by virtually every serious balanced point count system developer since, including Stanford Wong, Ken Uston, Lance Humble, and Arnold Snyder. As a serious player, Revere’s knowledge of the game included such esoteric techniques as shuffle-tracking and hole card play.

Max Rubin

Max is the author of Comp City first published in 1994. In this book, Max exposed techniques even non-counting players could use to get an advantage over the casinos by exploiting weaknesses in the casinos’ comp systems.

The initial manuscript for Comp City included advanced comp-hustling techniques that could be used by professional card counters, but the editors at Huntington Press decided to delete this section from the book in order to appeal to the wider market of recreational players. These excluded portions were published in Blackjack Forum in June, 1994, and can be found now in the BlackjackForumOnline.com Library.

See Max Rubin’s article, “Counting Cards in Comp City” in the Blackjack Forum Gambling Library.

Max Rubin is also known for developing one of the highest-edge methods of blackjack team play. Since Max is still out there deploying this play, that’s all that can be said about his playing career at the moment.

Arnold Snyder

Arnold Snyder is a professional blackjack player who has been writing about casino blackjack for 30 years. His first book, The Blackjack Formula (1980), revolutionized the ways professional card counters attacked the games by pointing out, for the first time, the relative importance of deck penetration (over rules or counting system) to a card counter’s win rate.

His discovery has since been borne out by numerous independent computer simulations. In fact, it’s become bedrock knowledge among card counters today that penetration is the name of the game, and many find it hard to believe that for the first two decades of card counting, players did not know this.

Snyder also went against the grain in the early 1980s by recommending that players start using highly simplified sets of strategy indices based on data from Peter Griffin’s analyses (see “How True Is Your True Count?”). Snyder also developed and published (in Blackjack for Profit) the first-ever unbalanced point count system.

In his 2003 The Blackjack Shuffle Tracker’s Cookbook: How Players Win (and Why They Lose) With Shuffle-Tracking (Huntington Press), Snyder revealed the most powerful method for beating today’s casino shuffles, and provided the first numbers available on the high edges that can be gained from different approaches to shuffle tracking.

Since 1981, Snyder has been the publisher and editor of Blackjack Forum, a quarterly journal for professional gamblers (now published online).

Snyder is also the author of Blackbelt in Blackjack and other works directed at serious players who are new to playing blackjack at a professional level. His book Radical Blackjack, a memoir of playing blackjack at the highest stakes, with the details of the methods used to beat the casinos, will be available in Spring 2013.

Keith Taft

Keith is not well-known to the general public, but among professional players he is revered as an electronics genius who has spent more than 30 years devising high-tech equipment—computers, video cameras, and communication devices—to beat the casinos. Blackjack was his initial target, and always remained his prime target.

Taft’s first blackjack computer, which he completed in 1972, weighed 15 pounds. Over the years, as computer chip technology developed, his computers became smaller, faster, and lighter. By the mid-1970s, he had a device that weighed only a few ounces that could play perfect strategy based on the exact cards remaining to be dealt.

If it were up to Keith, his son Marty’s name would be right along his in the Blackjack Hall of Fame, as the two have worked as partners since Marty was a teenager. For 30 years they have jointly created ever-more-clever hidden devices to beat the casinos, trained teams of players in their use, and have personally gone into the casinos to get the money.

Keith and Marty may, in fact, have literally invented the concept of computer “networking,” as they were wiring computer-equipped players together at casino blackjack tables 30 years ago in their efforts to beat the games. Taft equipment has been involved in some of the highest-edge plays that have ever taken place in blackjack history.

When Nevada outlawed devices in 1985, it was specifically as a result of a Taft device found on Keith’s brother, Ted—a miniature video camera built into Ted’s belt buckle that could relay an image of the dealer’s hole card as it was being dealt to a satellite receiving dish mounted in a pickup truck in the parking lot, where an accomplice read the video image then signaled Ted at the table with the information he needed to play his hand.

A pair of Keith’s “computer shoes” and a photo album of Keith’s devises are on permanent display in the Blackjack Hall of Fame museum at the Barona Casino in Lakeside, California.

An in-depth interview with Keith and Marty Taft was published in the Winter 2003-04 Blackjack Forum, and is available in the BlackjackForumOnline.com Library.

See RWM’s Gambling Wizards: Interview with Keith and Marty Taft in the Blackjack Forum Gambling Library.

Edward O. Thorp

Edward Oakley Thorp is widely regarded, by professional players as well as the general public, as the Father of Card Counting. It was in his book, Beat the Dealer, first published in 1962, that he presented his Ten Count system, the first powerful winning blackjack system ever made available to the public, and the first published successful mathematical system for beating any major casino gambling game. All card counting systems in use today are variations of Thorp’s Ten Count.

When Thorp’s book became a best-seller, the Las Vegas casinos attempted to change the standard rules of blackjack, but their customers would not accept the changes and refused to play the new version of the game. So, the Vegas casinos went back to the old rules, but switched from dealing hand-held one-deck games to four-deck shoe games, a change that the players would accept.

Unfortunately for the casinos, in 1966 Thorp’s revised second edition of Beat the Dealer was published. This edition presented the High-Low Count, as developed by Julian Braun, a more powerful and practical counting system for attacking these new shoe games.

In 1967, Thorp published Beat the Market (coauthoried with S. Kassouf), and shortly thereafter started (with J. Regan) the first market neutral derivatives-based hedge fund. To put it in the vernacular, he made zillions.

For many years Ed Thorp wrote a column for Gambling Times magazine [now defunct]. Many of these columns were collected in a book titled The Mathematics of Gambling , published in 1984 by Lyle Stuart. In 1961, working with C. Shannon, Thorp invented the first wearable advantage-play computer.

Thorp has an M.A. in Physics and a Ph.D. in mathematics. He has taught mathematics at UCLA, MIT, NMSU and UC Irvine, where he also taught quantitative finance.

To read more about Edward O. Thorp’s early experiences as a card counter, see “The First Counters: My Blackjack Trip in 1962 to Las Vegas and Reno with Professor Edward O. Thorp and Mickey MacDougall” by Russell T. Barnhart in the Blackjack Forum Gambling Library.

Ken Uston

Uston burst onto the scene in 1977 with the publication of The Big Player , co-authored with Roger Rapaport. In this book, Uston exposed the secrets of Al Francesco’s big player teams. The book caused a falling out between Al and Ken which lasted for years, as Al felt Ken had betrayed his trust as well as his teammates.

But there is no denying that this book caused an upheaval in the world of card counting, changing the ways that professionals looked at the game and attacked it. Three of the most successful international blackjack teams—the Tommy Hyland team, the MIT team, and the Czech team—all were founded in 1978, the year after Uston’s book was published.

Al and Ken later patched up their relationship and Uston went on to start many blackjack teams of his own. He was a personality on a grand scale, who legally challenged the casino industry in the courts of both New Jersey and Nevada. (See Ken Uston Sues Nevada.) His playing career spanned two decades of play at the highest levels, and included card counting, BP teams, hole card techniques, and concealed computer play.

Ken was also the author of Two Books on Blackjack (1979), Million Dollar Blackjack (1981), and Ken Uston on Blackjack (1986).

Uston died in 1987 at the age of 52. To read more about Ken Uston, see Arnold Snyder’s Interview with Ken Uston, and RWM’s Interview with Darryl Purpose (a long-time Uston team member) in the Blackjack Forum Gambling Library.

Stanford Wong

Stanford Wong self-published his first book, Professional Blackjack, in 1975. It was later published by the Gambler’s Book Club in Las Vegas, then revised and expanded numerous times and published by Wong’s own company, Pi Yee Press.

Wong is widely regarded as one of the most creative developers and sharpest analysts of systems and methods for beating the casinos. In Professional Blackjack, he described a never-before-revealed table-hopping style of playing shoe games, a method of play now known as “wonging.” Professional Blackjack had a profound impact on serious players because it provided card counters with an easy yet powerful method for attacking the abundant 4-deck shoe games that had taken over Las Vegas. Many pros still think of card counting opportunities as “pre-Wong” and “post-Wong.”

In his second book, Blackjack in Asia—a book priced at $2,000 and one of the rarest gambling books sought by collectors today—Wong discussed the unique blackjack games he had discovered in Asian casinos as a professional player, along with the optimum strategies he had devised for beating them. The book also included underground advice for exchanging currencies in these countries on the black market; as well as an account of his own hassles with customs officials when he attempted to leave the Philippines with his winnings. This book reveals more of Wong’s anti-establishment personality than any of his later books.

In 1980, Wong published Winning Without Counting, originally priced at $200, and again, this book is a collector’s item. He not only discusses many hole card techniques that had never before been mentioned in print—front-loading, spooking, and warp play—but he also delved into many clearly illegal methods of getting an edge over the house, including various techniques of bet-capping, card switching, card mucking, etc. He was widely criticized (by those in the casino industry) for the amusing way in which he discussed and analyzed such techniques, but anyone with half a brain could see that he was merely informing players with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor.

Wong subsequently published: Tournament Blackjack (1987); Basic Blackjack (1992); Casino Tournament Strategy (1992); Blackjack Secrets (1993); and since 1979 has published various newsletters including Current Blackjack News, aimed at serious and professional players. In addition to writing about blackjack, he has written other gambling books on subjects as diverse as horse racing and video poker.

See “Blackjack Tournament Strategy” by Stanford Wong in the Blackjack Forum Gambling Library.

Richard Munchkin, Darryl Purpose, and Zeljko Ranogajec

Richard Munchkin, Darryl Purpose, and Zeljko Ranogajec, as active players, have asked that we withhold additional information on their achievements in blackjack at this time. ♠

Why I’m Suing in Nevada

by Ken Uston

(From Blackjack Forum VI #2, June 1986)
© Blackjack Forum 1986

[Note from A.S.: After reading this article, I encourage you to read James Grosjean’s “It’s Not Paranoia If…” about his successful lawsuit against the Imperial Palace for false arrest–a major victory and step forward for players that would have made Uston very happy.]

After I won the legal battle against the Atlantic City casinos in September 1982, I was determined to fight the Nevada casinos as well. But I kept putting it off, and probably would never have gotten around to it were it not for a chance confrontation on a Lake Tahoe skiing trip in February, 1984.

I was relaxing with some friends at Caesars Tahoe, and playing some low stakes blackjack, betting no more than $50 per hand. A floorman named Neil Lewis, who’d been giving me dirty looks all evening, finally whispered to the dealer, and I was suddenly out of the game.

I asked Lewis what was going on—our betting levels were certainly no threat to his club—and Vegas Caesars had always let me play, as long as I stayed below $200 per hand. Lewis’ smug, superior attitude and his curt, condescending responses got to me. That’s what did it. When I got home, I wrote to the Commission, and the entire process began.

Now it’s over two years later, and I’ve just appealed to the Nevada Supreme Court, after fighting a losing battle for two years with the Commission, the Nevada Attorney, the Nevada Resort Association, and the Clark County District Court.

Right off the bat, I can tell you that because I’ve invested so much time and effort, because I feel that the law and the facts are totally on the side of non-exclusion, and because I’m so wrapped up in the legal research and enraged at what I believe to be totally unfair tactics of the opposition, that there’s no way I’d give up now. Yet, I sometimes wonder if I did the right thing by starting all this. What will be accomplished? And I’m aware that just about every interest I can think of seems to want me to lose this case, for their own reasons:

• The Nevada casinos obviously want the right to continue to throw out counters.
• The Nevada Resort Association (representing the casinos in court) obviously wants what the casinos want.
• The Commission, far from being an independent, objective government agency serving the interests of the public, obviously wants barring—in fact, they are the opposition in this case (which is “Uston vs. The Commission”).
• The Nevada Attorney General is not only my opposing counsel, but I suspect their lawyers would feel humiliated if someone who wasn’t even a lawyer beat them in court.
• The Griffin Agency would lose business if they couldn’t list card counters in their “Mug Book” (which I feel is a crass invasion of our privacy), circulate fliers to their casino clients, and have their agents patrol the casionos and identify and pull up card counters.
• Card counters are worried that, if I win, the game of blackjack may be ruined. (This may be possible, although there’s no doubt that Nevada competition is much keener than in New Jersey–which might keep many games beatable.)
• Publishers of blackjack books and newsletters want the game to be beatable so they can sell books and maintain high volume subscription lists. In fact, the publisher of one of my blackjack books told me, “I’m with you in principle, Kenny, but think about the effect of what you’re doing.”
• Blackjack authors and teachers may fear that the game would become lots toughter, and that they’d be out of business.
• Lawyers who specialize in representing counters would lose business if counters were no longer hassled by casinos.
• I, too, would have something to lose. If the game were altered, I may not be able to form teams in the future. I’d also endanger my royalties from blackjack books, a video casette, and computer software that instructs people how to play blackjack. And on rare occasions I do wonder if there might actually be a risk of physical violence, as my friends sometimes suggest.

I’d like to say this to any counters who are criticizing my efforts, but who haven’t been hassled yet. You’ve got to go through the humiliation at least once to fully understand what’s going on.

I can’t tell you how outraged and incredulous counters (teammates and others) get when they’re barred for the first time. Their typical reaction is:

“I can’t believe it. How can they do this to ME?” and

“Those bastards. I’ll sue ’em for everything they’ve got.”

But when these people get jostled into a backroom, involuntarily photographed, or arrested, their attitudes get far more militant–to say nothing of when they’re threatened with physical violence or, even, beaten up.

And don’t be deceived–physical threats–and sometimes violence–are a fact of life in Nevada casinos. Just a few weeks ago, an ex-teammate, 100 pounds soaking wet, was dragged across the lengthy Flamingo Hilton floor by two huge uniformed Neanderthals, hustled into a backroom, given bruises about the arms and legs, and arrested.

And I’m sure by now you’ve heard of the two counters (who were also first-basing), who were beaten by Horseshoe security, both getting broken ribs and one receiving contusions of the spleen, kidney, lungs and liver.

Many casinos view detention, back-rooming, involuntary photographing, reading the Tresspass Act, and even physical abuse as their BASIC RIGHT. In this current case, the opposition has argued, increulously, “Counters have redress to the courts when this happens. It’s not the Commission’s responsibility to promulgate regulations to prevent this.”

As I sit writing this, I have no feeling in the left part of my mouth and stiff muscles surround my left eye, because of a sucker punch thrown at me by a Mapes casino security guard in 1978, who happened to be a former Coast Guard boxer. The reason for the blind punch: I was staying at the Mapes as “Billy Williams, from Texas,” I beat them for $7,000, and was finally recognized and thrown out–physically.

I’ve sent Arnold pictures of my broken face–which he may or may not choose to publish. [Note from A.S.–I’m looking for the original photos in my files and will try to get them posted here soon. They’re shocking.]

I daresay most of you would probably take it personally if five bones around your left eye were crushed, and you had to wear a metal pin in your face for the rest of your life, because you were suspected, by some goon pitboss, of playing blackjack too skillfully.  ♠