Famous Blackjack Players: The Mathematicians, Teams and High Rollers Who Changed the Game

The Four Horsemen of Aberdeen: the inventors of basic strategy

In the mid-1950s, four men serving at the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott, set out to work out the best way to play every blackjack hand. They had no computer, only desk calculators and a lot of patience.

Their paper, "The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack," appeared in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in September 1956. It was the first accurate version of what we now call basic strategy, and they expanded it into a small book, Playing Blackjack to Win. Later computer checks found their strategy was off from perfect play by only hundredths of a percent.

They became known as the Four Horsemen of Aberdeen and were inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame together in the late 2000s. Every strategy chart since, including the one we built for the table at BlackJack Streak, descends from their work. See the modern version in our basic strategy chart.

Edward O. Thorp: the professor who beat the dealer

Edward Thorp, a young mathematician, built on the Four Horsemen's work and asked a sharper question: what happens to the odds as cards leave the deck? Using an IBM 704 computer, he showed that the remaining cards sometimes favor the player, and that someone who tracked them could raise their bets at exactly those moments. He published the idea in 1961 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Then he tested it. With $10,000 of backing from Manny Kimmel, a wealthy professional gambler, Thorp played in Reno and Lake Tahoe and reportedly won $11,000 in a single weekend. In 1962 he published Beat the Dealer, which taught card counting to the public, sold more than 700,000 copies and made the New York Times bestseller list. Kimmel appeared in it, thinly disguised, as "Mr. X."

The casinos noticed. According to an exhibit by the University of California, Irvine's library, the Nevada Resort Hotel Association announced rule changes on April 1, 1964, restricting splits and doubles and shuffling more often. Players stayed away and the old rules came back within months. The longer-lasting response was more gradual: more decks, earlier shuffles, and barring counters.

Thorp went on to apply the same thinking to markets, running the hedge fund Princeton/Newport Partners from 1969 to 1989, and told the whole story in his 2017 memoir, A Man for All Markets.

Al Francesco: the inventor of team play

A lone counter who suddenly jumps from small bets to big ones is easy to spot. Al Francesco's answer, in the 1970s, was the team: counters sitting at many tables at small stakes, signaling a "big player" to come in and bet heavily only when the count was good. The big player looked like a carefree gambler and never had to vary their bets at one table. Francesco was in the Blackjack Hall of Fame's first class, recognized for creating the blackjack team.

Ken Uston: the big player who took Atlantic City to court

Ken Uston was an unlikely gambler: a Yale graduate with a Harvard MBA and a senior vice president of the Pacific Stock Exchange. After reading Thorp, he joined Francesco's team and soon became one of its big players. On the team's first five-day run it won $44,100, of which Uston's share was $2,100.

When casinos started barring him, Uston turned to disguises. When Resorts International in Atlantic City barred him in 1979, he sued. In Uston v. Resorts International (1982), the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that Atlantic City casinos could not bar card counters on their own; that power belonged to the state's Casino Control Commission. The casinos responded by changing the game instead, adding decks and shuffling earlier.

Uston wrote The Big Player and Million Dollar Blackjack, and, in a twist few remember, the bestselling Mastering Pac-Man. He died in Paris in 1987 at 52.

The MIT Blackjack Team: card counting as a business

The MIT team grew out of a class on gambling during MIT's January term at the end of the 1970s. In 1980, a group of students met Bill Kaplan, a Harvard graduate who had already run a profitable blackjack team in Las Vegas. Kaplan agreed to back them on one condition: it would be run like a business, with a single counting system, strict training, and records of every session.

According to histories of the team, its first bank started in August 1980 with $89,000 and more than doubled in ten weeks. Recruits had to pass demanding tests before they played with team money. Through the 1980s and 1990s, players rotated in and out, and the team kept refining its methods. A casino security investigator told ABC News in 2003 that the team "took over $400,000 in one weekend" in Las Vegas. By around 2000 the run was over, as players moved on and casinos caught up.

The team became famous through Ben Mezrich's bestseller Bringing Down the House and the 2008 film 21. Both took big liberties: Mezrich later acknowledged that many characters and scenes were composites or invented, and the film's professor running the team never existed. One real team manager, John Chang, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2007.

Don Johnson: the negotiator

Don Johnson didn't count cards. In 2010 and 2011 he negotiated: a 20% discount on losses over $500,000, player-friendly rules, and bets of about $100,000 a hand. Over six months he won about $15 million from three Atlantic City casinos, including roughly $5.8 million from the Tropicana in one session. He was inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame in 2017. The full story is in the biggest blackjack wins in history.

The Blackjack Hall of Fame

The Blackjack Hall of Fame was created in 2002 and is housed at Barona Resort & Casino in San Diego County, California. The first class of seven was chosen by a public vote followed by a vote of professional players at the Blackjack Ball, an invitation-only gathering of experts. In a nice touch, inductees receive lifetime comps at Barona in exchange for agreeing never to play its blackjack tables.

What the legends can teach a regular player

• Start with basic strategy. Every one of these players built on the Four Horsemen's chart. Without it, the house edge is many times larger. Simulations we ran through BlackJack Streak's rules engine show that copying the dealer's style costs about 5.6% of every bet, against about 0.4% with perfect basic strategy.
• Counting is real, but narrow. It needs a game where the cards aren't reshuffled after every hand (BlackJack Streak's shoe runs to a cut card, so you can practice), a big bankroll, and patience through long losing streaks.
• The casinos adapt. More decks, earlier shuffles, shuffle machines, and 6 to 5 payouts are all responses to players like these. Our history of blackjack traces how the game changed.
• Discipline beats drama. The MIT team's real secret was bookkeeping, training and rules, not Hollywood heists.

You don't need a team or a bankroll to learn what they learned. At BlackJack Streak the chips are free, the rules are real, and Frank deals as many hands as you want to play. Start with the chart, then try counting a shoe and check your count against the cards listed in the Fair shuffle panel.

Sources

• The Four Horsemen of Aberdeen, Las Vegas Advisor
• Four Horsemen (blackjack), Wikipedia
• Edward O. Thorp, Wikipedia
• Finding the Edge: The Work and Insights of Edward O. Thorp, UC Irvine Libraries
• Thorp's impact on blackjack, Las Vegas Advisor
• Ken Uston, Wikipedia, citing The New York Times and Blackjack Forum
• MIT Blackjack Team, Wikipedia
• How MIT Students Broke the Bank in Vegas, ABC News (September 2003)
• Blackjack Hall of Fame, Wikipedia
• Don Johnson (gambler), Wikipedia