The Book That Made Vegas Rewrite Blackjack, Then Rewrite It Back
In the fall of 1960, a young mathematics instructor at MIT named Edward Thorp fed a deck of cards, translated into probabilities, into an IBM 704, a machine that filled a room and read its instructions off stacks of punch cards. He wasn't trying to build a gambling system. He was testing whether a card game everyone assumed favoured the house by a fixed, unbeatable margin actually did. The machine's answer, run and rerun over months, was no. Two years later Thorp put that answer in a book, and within roughly eighteen months, Nevada's casinos had rewritten the rules of blackjack, then quietly rewritten them back. The Four Horsemen Get There First Thorp wasn't the first to run the numbers. In 1956, four mathematicians working independently of the casino industry, Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott, published "The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack" in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, having worked the odds by hand ...