Pioneers of the Blackjack game

  1. Edward O. Thorp

    A very famous mathematician known to have developed a fascination with the game of Blackjack and the mathematics of risk was Edward Thorp. After he received his PhD in 1961, he became a lecturer at MIT. He wrote a paper titled Fortune’s Formula which he presented at the American Mathematical Association annual meeting. This paper described some of Thorp’s early Blackjack game models, which he ran on an IBM 704. To test his theories, Thorp joined forces with Emmanuel Kimmel, a New York businessman. The two of them went to Reno, Nevada to play Blackjack using card counting techniques that has never been heard of before. They started with a bankroll of $10,000 bankroll and finished their adventure with more than double of that figure. Moreover, it was with them that the card counting began.

  2. Ken Uston

    Ken Uston earned his notoriety as a blackjack player through his card counting techniques which helped him to earn a fortune in the 1970s. He was a mathematics genius with an IQ of 169. Ken attended Yale University at the age of 16 and later got his MBA from Harvard University. Soon after that he became the Vice-President of the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco. After several years of success, he teamed up with Keith Taft, an electronics engineer who had developed a computer that played a perfect game of Blackjack and could be worn without detection.

  3. Stanford Wong

    Stanford Wong, often considered the Godfather of Blackjack, continued where Thorp left off, further expanding on the theories of the Blackjack The term “wonging”, which relates to card counting, originated because of Stanford Wong many years of Blackjack success. He was the first to beat the Continuous Shuffle Machines (CSM’s) at the casinos, making off with tens of thousands of dollars. Needless to say refinements have been made to the Continuous Shuffle Machines since then.

  4. The Infamous MIT students Blackjack Club

    The MIT students Blackjack Club (1900s) was created when a team of students took on Las Vegas casinos as high-rollers on weekends and came home with millions of dollars. They proved that the one feature that made blackjack different also made it possible for them to consistently beat the casino game.