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According to Albert Einstein, blackjack became popular during World War II, and was called “black-jack” from the practice of paying a bonus to a player who held an ace of spades with a jack of spades or clubs. John Scarne, (New Complete Guide to Gambling, 1961, Simon - Schuster), puts the year when this curious rule first appeared at 1912, when twenty-one tables appeared in horse-betting parlors in Evanston, Illinois. According to Scarne, he discovered the origins of blackjack in America as a result of his private discussions with old-time gamblers, not from any published texts that can be looked up today.

I am skeptical of much of what Scarne has written about blackjack, so I’ll quote from Mickey MacDougall’s MacDougall on Dice and Cards (Coward-McCann, 1944, NY), which was published prior to any of Scarne’s books: “Many professionals dress up the game by giving prizes for certain hands. A favorite stunt is to offer ten times the size of the wager to anyone holding a natural twenty-one with a black jack. This adds interest to the game, but it also tempts a player to increase his stakes.”

In an honestly dealt single-deck game, this gimmick bonus would give the player a substantial edge over the house, assuming the player knew basic strategy (an unlikely assumption). I would also assume that a gambling house that offered this bonus would be using any number of illegitimate methods to assure the house a healthy edge.

That’s when another historian suggested another version of this word’s ethymology. And the most important addition was Harvey Dubner’s Hi-Lo counting system, which Thorp called the Complete Point Count, with a computer-optimized strategy devised by Julian Braun. To the casinos’ frustration, this was a system that could more easily be applied to multiple-deck games.

Thorp was keeping the casinos on the run.

Thorp also included a Simple Point Count in this new edition of his book, but at the time that strategy seemed way too simple to most players to gain much of an edge, or to be taken seriously by players who wanted to beat the game. Later, the power of Thorp’s simpler method of adjusting the running count, without keeping a separate count of the exact number of cards played, would be shown.
Still, the casino’s fears were mostly unfounded. The Complete Point Count was easier to use than the ten-count, but it was not a lot easier. It required players to keep two separate counts. In addition to the running count of the cards’ point total, the player had to keep a count of the exact number of cards remaining to be played. And in order to play his hand, he had to memorize a chart of 158 different strategy changes to be made according to the count.

In 1975, Stanford Wong came out with Professional Blackjack. Wong had a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, hence his pseudonym. This book was the next big advance for card counters. Wong described his playing style, which included table-hopping shoe games to avoid playing at negative counts. As four-deck shoes were the most widely available games in Las Vegas by that time, this original approach was brilliant. The casinos looked for card counters by watching for their betting spreads. It had never occurred to the casinos that a counter might be watching a table from the aisles, waiting for an advantageous count before jumping in to bet.

The counting system Wong published was the Hi-Lo Count, and like Revere’s count, used the easy divide-by-remaining-deck(s) approach to running count adjustments. So, at last, some twelve years after Harvey Dubner had proposed the Hi-Lo count values, his system was available in a format both fully optimized with strategy indices, and presented with a simple methodology of play. Wong’s table-hopping approach to shoe games was in many ways similar to Al Francesco’s Big Player (BP) team approach, but allowed a solo card counter to attack shoe games invisibly, and without a team of spotters. This playing style has since become widely known as wonging.

When you walk up to a slot machine in a casino or log into an online casino and play the slots, it’s a battle between you and the machine to see who comes out the winner. Actually, even if you’re a professional, the machine will almost always come out ahead over the long term. That’s the way casinos make a profit. But for fun, you can sign up for a tournament where you’re playing against the other players. In the real world, one of the current tournaments is running at Cache Creek Casino in Brooks (Yolo County), for the next six weeks (it finishes at midnight on the 19th June).

Like most real-world tournaments, the casino has corralled a number of machines and members of the local slots club are rotated in every fifteen minutes to play for three minutes. The player who racks up the biggest score in those three minutes will be the winner. The total prize money fund is $200,000 with everyone in the top fifty winning at least $1,000.