How Twenty-One Became Blackjack
I am skeptical of much of what books said about blackjack and other casino games, so I’ll quote from Mickey MacDougall’s MacDougall on Dice and Cards, which was published prior to any of Scarne’s books: “Many cool players 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, thinking 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 curious bonus payout that gave blackjack its name, however, has long since disappeared. There may be some casino somewhere that pays a small bonus if a player is dealt a natural 21 which includes a jack of spades or clubs, but that is no longer a normal rule of the game. Today, a blackjack is simply any initial two cards that consist of an ace and any ten-valued card.
Thorp was keeping the casinos on the run.
Still, the casino owners’ 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 differs to be made according to the count.
That’s when Ed Thorp dropped another nuclear bomb. Under the auspices of their Old Paperback division, Random House published a revised and expanded edition of Beat the Dealer. And the most important addition was Harvey Dubner’s Hi-Lo counting system, which Thorp called the Complete Point Count. To the casinos’ frustration, this was a system that could more easily be applied to multiple-deck games.