The history of the BlackJack card game is still being disputed but was probably derived from French games such as "chemin de fer" and "French Ferme". BlackJack originated in French casinos around 1700 where it was called "vingt-et-un" ("twenty-one") and has been played in the U.S. since the 1800's. BlackJack is aptly named because if a player got a Jack of Spades and an Ace of Spades as the first two cards (Spade being the color black), the player was additionally compensated.

Gambling was legal in the West from the 1850's to 1910, at which time the state of Nevada made it a felony to operate a gambling game. In 1931, the state re-legalized casino gambling and BlackJack became one of the primary games of chance offered to gamblers.

The first recognized effort to apply mathematics to BlackJack began in 1953 and peaked in 1956 with a published paper. Roger Baldwin wrote a paper in the Journal of the American Statistical Association titled "The Optimum Strategy in BlackJack". Baldwin and other pioneers used calculators, probability and statistics theory to substantially reduce the house advantage. Although the title of their paper was 'optimum strategy', it wasn't really the best strategy because they needed a computer to refine their system.

Professor Edward O. Thorp picked up where Baldwin and company left off. In 1962, Thorp refined their basic strategy and developed the first card counting techniques. He published his results in "Beat the Dealer"; a book that became so popular that for a week in 1963 it was on the New York Times Best Seller List. The book also scared the hell out of the casinos.

The casinos were so affected by "Beat the Dealer" that they began to change the rules of the game to make it more difficult for the players to win. This didn't last long as people protested by not playing the new version of BlackJack. The unfavorable rules resulted in a loss of income for the casinos. As the casinos were losing money, they quickly reverted back to the original rules.

Thanks to Thorp's book and all the media attention it generated, casinos made a bundle from the game's newly gained popularity. Beat the Dealer's "Ten-Count" method isn't easy to master, and remains rather difficult to find these days.

Another major contributor in the history of winning BlackJack play is Julian Braun, who worked at IBM. His thousands of lines of computer code and hours of BlackJack simulation on IBM mainframes resulted in The Basic Strategy, and a number of card-counting techniques. His conclusions were used in a 2nd edition of Beat the Dealer, and later in Lawrence Revere's 1977 book "Playing BlackJack as a Business".

Lastly, there's Ken Uston, who used five computers that were built into the shoes of members of his playing team in 1977. They won over a hundred thousand dollars in a very short time but one of the computers was confiscated and sent to the FBI. They decided that the computer used public information on BlackJack playing and was not a cheating device. You may have seen this story in a movie made about his BlackJack exploits detailed in his book "The Big Player". Ken was also featured on a 1981 60 Minutes show and helped lead a successful legal challenge to prevent Atlantic City casinos from barring card counters.