Thank you for the QoD on the world's most liberal blackjack. It brought back good memories of feeling like a pro when I played at the Las Vegas Club (even though I was anything but). One of the rules was the six-card charlie was an automatic winner. I've always wondered where that term came from. Can you tell me (us)?
A "six-card Charlie" is a blackjack hand of six cards totaling 21 or less that wins automatically in games that offer the rule. An earlier version of the rule was a five-card Charlie, after which some casinos experimented with six- and even seven-card Charlies. The Wizard of Oz has calculated the six-card winner as reducing the house by around 0.16% with typical rules.
So why "Charlie?"
No one knows for sure, at least that we could find -- no documented etymology or explanation. It's considered one of the minor mysteries of blackjack terminology.
We did find several theories, however.
Some people believe it comes from the military phonetic alphabet ("Charlie" = C), but there is no evidence that the blackjack term originated there. The blackjack usage appears to have developed independently.
The explanation favored by many gambling historians is that "Charlie" has long been English slang for "some fellow" or "an unnamed person," much like "Joe" or "Jack." (Perhaps "George" was already taken to mean a good tipper.)
The one we like the best is that it was casino slang that was never written down. Much of casino jargon, especially dealer and pit slang, spread orally. Terms like "paint" for a ten-value card or "ploppy" for an unskilled player circulated for years before anyone bothered to document them. "Charlie" may have been one of those expressions whose original meaning was obvious to casino employees at the time, but was never recorded.
In fact, the earliest printed references of six-card Charlie use the term as though readers already know it, which suggests it had been circulating in casino lingo for some time before starting to appear in the literature. Books and magazines from the 1970s and '80s treat "Charlie" as an established rule, rather than explaining its origin.
One other interesting historical note. Five-card Charlies were once considerably more common than six-card Charlies. The five-card version gives the player a much larger mathematical boost (around 1.4% under typical rules), which is one reason casinos largely abandoned it. A six-card Charlie is much less generous, making it an occasional promotional rule, rather than a standard feature.
So if you were hoping for a colorful story — "Charlie was a legendary blackjack player in Reno who kept drawing little cards, you're out of luck. It appears to be one of those pieces of casino slang whose original "Charlie" has been lost to history.
