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gamguru ONLINE BLACKJACK                        
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Blackjack Blackjack has long been a casino favourite. It is relatively easy to learn to play and over the years has acquired its own myths and legends. Blackjack rules developed in the 1600's in France and was known as vingt-et-un. This game rewarded players for drawing the Jack of Spades which of course is a black Jack. Blackjack spread to Britain and America soon after the French Revolution and was popular with gamblers because it was such a flexible game allowing the odds and bets to be altered. With the advent of Government regulation and control the Blackjack Rules became standardised to eliminate cheating. Some of the rules meant that Blackjack had unique properties in casino gambling. These included that the dealer could not shuffle the single deck of cards and that the dealer had to get 17 before they could and had to stand. This meant that the odds of the player winning altered as the game progressed and at times would favour the player not the dealer. Mathematicians realised that if they could calculate when these situations arose they could bet more heavily than normal and would on balance win more money more often. In 1956 Roger Baldwin et al published a Blackjack strategy paper called ''Basic Strategy for Blackjack'' in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. In the late 1950's Edward Thorpe of MIT was planning to go to Nevada on holiday and decided to do some research on casino Blackjack before he went. He quickly realised that because the deck was not shuffled after each hand the deck was a record of previous hands and in a way had been imparted with a memory in the same way a computer has a memory. He also realised that after each hand the odds of the player winning changed because the cards that they (and the dealer) would receive next could not include those dealt in recent hands. It is a bit like Russian Roulette where one bullet is placed into the barrel of a six shooter and the trigger pulled. The first time the odds will be 1 in six that the gun will fire. If the barrel is then spun the odds will remain 1 in six . If however the barrel isn't spun the odds will change to 1 in 5 and if the gun doesn't fire 1 in 4 and then 1 in 3, if the barrel were then spun the odds would return to 1 in 6. Not shuffling the deck in Blackjack is like not spinning the barrel and allows the odds to change. He further realised that since the Blackjack dealer could not stick on 16 or less, if there were a higher proportion of high denomination cards in a part of the deck the dealer was more likely to go bust on the turn of the extra card and when there was a higher proportion of low denomination cards in a part of the deck the dealer was less likely to go bust and therefore more likely to win. He devised a Blackjack system of what has become known as card counting. He knew that it would be impossible to remember what each card dealt was, so he allocated a value of +1 to high denomination cards 0 to middle denomination cards and -1 to low denomination cards. Starting on 0 he would quickly change his running score as the Blackjack game progressed and when the score became positive he bet more heavily and when the score became negative he bet less heavily. With his system he could effectively change the odds of winning from about 3% in the casino or card room's favour to 1% in his own. Although this may not sound much we are talking about 1% every ten minutes as compared to 6% per year from a bank, a rather better return on investment! In 1962 Professor Thorpe's Blackjack book ''Beat the Dealer'' was published and a battle of wits between the Casinos and the ''Card counters'' as they became known ensued. First they tried simply shuffling the decks after each hand rendering the system ineffective but the players got bored by the constant shuffling and moved to other games. Court cases taken up by the powerful Gambling Lobby made card counting illegal but almost impossible to prove. Eventually the Casinos came up with the Blackjack dealers shoe. This open ended container holds eight decks of cards at a time and it was thought that it would put a stop to the counting. This however was the beginning of the age of the computer and although the very slight remaining advantage of a counting an eight deck pack was too small for a human it was ideal for a computer. So Blackjack players like Ken Uston began to use small computers concealed in their shoes and clothes to count each and every card and bet according to the computer's calculations. These calculations could swing the odds to around 2 - 3 % in the players favour and once again the casinos began to take heavy losses on their Blackjack Tables . These devises were outlawed and Uston wrote a couple of books about his adventures and Blackjack strategies in general. One book is called Million Dollar Blackjack and the other is called Ken Uston on Blackjack. More recently card counters have formed teams so that one or two players do the calculations (but do not change their betting pattern) with the inevitable tell tale facial expressions that casino workers look for, whilst a third member of the team bets more heavily when given the signal to. Many students of MIT were apparently paying their way through college using their phenomenal mathematical abilities to make this system work and make money playing Blackjack. Casinos have again hit back by using sophisticated computer facial recognition software that picks known and suspected Blackjack card counters out as they enter a casino from a worldwide databank and then asking them to leave. They have also taught their own dealers to count the cards and to shuffle when he odds are no longer in the Blackjack dealers favour. No doubt however the battle of wits will continue for a long time to come. In online Blackjack the cards are shuffled after every game using a Random Number Generator based on having eight decks in the pack so card counting cannot be used.
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