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The era of the modern American casino began in 1931 when the state
of Nevada legalized casino gambling after, ironically, a twenty-one
year long prohibition! After the Second World War the gambling industry
in Nevada grew enormously and the game of blackjack spread to the rest
of the world in this way, although of course it had never left countries
such as England and France where it was also extremely popular in casinos.
The huge popularity of the game in Nevada (the Mecca of modern gambling)
and Atlantic City rejuvenated its global appeal. In Nevada something
new was created during the 1950s: a city that was known entirely for
gambling and other forms of adult entertainment, a city that had a
glamorous and edgy image grafted onto its existing reputation as an
oasis of the "wild west". This image peaked during the 1960s
when the boxing and musical entertainments on offer in Las Vegas reached
unparalleled heights, when gamblers still dressed up in tuxedos and
bow ties for the tables, and celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, Sammy
Davis Jr. and Sonny Liston (to name but a few) could be seen on the "high-rolling" tables
of the best casinos every night. As far as the gambling went, the blackjack
table was probably the most iconic image from Las Vegas, and then the
glamorous image of the game was augmented by a new development.
By the 1950s statisticians had noticed that it was theoretically
possible for a player to considerably reduce the built-in house advantage
of the game. An academic even published a dry and dusty paper on the
subject in the Journal of the American Statistical Association which
received almost no attention, even though it was also published in
1958 as a paperback book called "Winning Blackjack", mainly
because the theory required the use of a computer by the player to
determine exactly how and when to exploit the odds and so was clearly
utterly impractical.
All this changed in 1962 when a book called "Beat
the Dealer" was released. It seemed to show clearly and simply
how an average Joe could walk into an American casino and use a card-counting
strategy to shift the odds of a blackjack game so far away from the
casino that the overall odds would actually be in the player's favor!
The casinos, realizing that the "basic strategy" outlined
in the book was mathematically correct, began to panic. Most casinos
dealt with this threat to their profits by changing the payout odds
(needless to say, to increase the casino's favor) in order to destroy
the odds formula of the book. As it turned out though, the fears of
the casinos were largely baseless. The card-counting system required
by the book was too tough for most people to use under real life conditions.
To be used successfully it required a player to incorporate every single
card dealt from the beginning of a pack of cards into a count. The
player had to maintain two separate counts – one for the number of
ten-valued cards and another for the rest. A player would begin with
the mental totals of 16 ten-valued cards and 36 other-valued cards
and make a deduction in the appropriate "column" as each
card would be dealt. At the end of each hand a player would then divide
the number of other-valued cards remaining by the total of the ten-valued
cards remaining. The resulting number showed mathematically what the
player's advantage would be during the next hand: if the number was
positive, it represented the player's advantage over the house; if
negative, the house's advantage over the player (the correct bet to
make could therefore be decided upon quite easily). It is easy to see
why this was pretty irresistible to a lot of players, but just try
throwing cards quickly around a table and trying to keep two separate
totals going in your head without missing a beat – or a single card!
After this book was published, the casinos were deluged with such a
flood of players who were unable to use this counting system effectively
that they ended up making a net profit from the publication of "Beat
the Dealer"!
The casinos had further problems with card counters as the system
was refined to a "single total" counting method, which was
widely publicized during the 1970s, and so the casinos again either
made subtle changes in odds or used a few other tricks to eliminate
the danger card counters posed to their profits. The mystique of blackjack
remains: the only casino game where the holy grail of beating the house
consistently seems to be within reach!
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