A Background of the Game and Its Systems

Blackjack is a simple game. Object and play are elementary. The problems that we encounter while playing it are simple, and so should be the answers.
Up until the early Sixties accepted styles of play included standard strategies such as "mimic the dealer" (stand on seventeen or more; hit sixteen or less; no doubling or splitting). Others insisted that one should never hit a sixteen against Dealer's ten, for that was courting certain death. Most of these styles favored the house.

In the early Sixties a mathematical, Dr. Edward Q Thorp, devised a method of tracking the ten-valued cards and the aces. He used a plus/minus counting system (cards two thru six = + 1; seven thru nine = 0; ten thru ace = - 1), a brilliantly simple solution for tracking the cards which he considered the most important He then combined it with a computer-based strategy that called for the most favorable response to each possible situation

His system was very successful. In fact, it singlehanded1y caused Las Vegas to make rule alterations. During 1964, for a brief period, the Las Vegas Hotel Resort Association announced that the rules of blackjack were being changed. No longer would they allow the splitting of aces, and doubling down was limited to hard eleven. Said spokesman Gabriel Vigilante, "In the last fifteen years there hasn't been one plane that landed without at least one person in the possession of a system. This guy (meaning Thorp) is the first in Las Vegas history to have a system that works."

It was only a matter of weeks, what with dropping tourism rates and screaming dealers, who were losing tips, before they reverted to the original rules. Meter all, the good players just continued to win, though not quite as much, and the bad players just stopped playing.

Much of casino blackjack history from that point until now has been the assault of the Ten Counters and the efforts of the casinos to deal with them The War Of The Tens. For a while, this consisted of merely throwing out anyone suspected of counting, and, in some places, just to be on the safe side, throwing out anyone who was winning.

Then a counting superstar, Ken Uston, successfully sued the Atlantic City online casino for discriminating against counters. Facing the same case in Nevada, however, the courts, while not going so far as to declare counting illegal (as most dealers and pit bosses will claim), did uphold the right of the resort industry to protect itself when its livelihood was threatened. In other words, the Nevada casinos can still bar counters.

Still, despite this huge difference in attitudes between the two states, they faced an identical problem: how to defeat the Counter. Because of the New Jersey Supreme Court ruling, eastern casinos had to find non-expulsion methods to combat them.

First, Atlantic City did away with most of their on end two-deck games, creating four-, six- and eight-deck shoes." Then they worked on their shuffles and postplay card pick-up techniques, those which encouraged extreme clumping in the decks or shoes.

Clump: a group of cards of similar or like value bunched in one area of the deck.] These clumps of tens and small cards led to distorted, inflated counts, effectively stymieing the counters. The new defenses rapidly spread west, to Nevada. If you haven't experienced the new clumping, you're in for a shock
What the casinos have done with their defenses is very effective and, really, quite brilliant. Tired of making it easy for the Ten Counters, they didn't want their defenses to ruin the game for everyone else. So, while barely altering the motions of play, they devised a defense that both increases their take and defeats the Ten Counter.

Dealers still shuffle the same amount of time, sometimes even less, using shuffles that preserve the structure of the deck. All of the cards remain on the table until the end of play, taking up less time for card pick-up and allowing them to preserve trends in the deck For instance, if the cards have been coming out high-low/ high-low (really just a clump of highs mixed with a clump of lows) and they're returned to the deck in the same order, they're likely to come out again in similar fashion Clumps of cards tend to survive four, five and even more rounds of play. And the casinos noticed that in new, unshuffled decks there are ready-made clumps of tens and small-valued cards. They figured that if the Ten Counters want tens, then let 'me drown in them.

Inflated ten counts started to appear. The Counters, drooling with anticipation, would plop down their heavy bets, only to see more small cards come out. And when the paint family showed, everybody got some, so they all pushed twenty with the dealer.

These days the Counter does no better, sometimes worse, than the Hunch Player.

The casinos know one other thing: Some player will always find a mathematical way to beat them.

Article by josheph

About the Author: looking for an online portal, casino information source and manual for successful casino gaming? Come find relevant information about where you can play your favorite casino games and how to increase your profits while minimizing your risks, with specialized tips for different casino games, fromSlots and Roulette to BlackJack, all can be found at sydneycasino.com Info you get the most of out the universe of online gaming! Sydneycasino.info stays in constant touch with our regulars and new players, offering responsive service and constant updates to our huge database of articles and guides. http://www.sydneycasino.info