When was the insurance bet first offered in blackjack?
The only credible source we found to answer this question is ... us!
The late great Arnold wrote about it in his Big Book of Blackjack, which was excerpted on our site in 2022. All the other sources we checked were inconclusive at best. Here's Arnold's explanation.
An older European card game probably contributed a single feature to our modern-day game of blackjack. The French card game trente-et-quarante, or “thirty-and-forty,” was introduced at the Spa Casino in Belgium in 1780 and had a structure similar to baccarat, where the players could bet on either of two hands dealt.
One curious feature of trente-et-quarante later became a feature of blackjack. Trente-et-quarante was a house-banked game and the edge came from the house taking half of all bets when both hands totaled exactly 31. But players were allowed to place an “insurance” wager against this possibility.
None of the descriptions of vingt-un (the original French game) in various old Hoyles mention anything about an “insurance” wager being allowed. Photographs of casino blackjack tables from the early 1950s don't show the familiar “Insurance Pays 2 to 1” signs on the layout, though photographs of tables from the 1960s usually do display this wording.
Also notable is that in the 1957 analysis of blackjack by Baldwin, Cantey, Maisel, and McDermott in their groundbreaking Playing Blackjack to Win, no mention is made of an insurance wager. Yet Ed Thorp provides an analysis of the insurance option in his 1962 Beat the Dealer.
Since both of these books are very thorough in their descriptions of the player options, we must assume that insurance appeared in Nevada sometime between 1957 and 1962.
