Blackjack was first played in France, in the early 1700s, where it was called Vingt-et-un, the French equivalent for Twenty and One. The name blackjack was a result of a special bet where a player was rewarded for picking the ace of spades and the jack of spades as the first two cards.
From then to the 20th century, the game spread across the globe. In 1956, a person named Roger Baldwin wrote a paper on the optimum strategy in blackjack, which was published in the journal of the American Statistical Association. It was the first attempt to apply mathematics to the game. Baldwin used probability, calculators and statistics to show different ways to reduce the house advantage. His paper looked like a typical mathematical paper, full of calculations. What he needed was a computer, to refine the deductions.
In 1962, the ‘Einstein of Blackjack,’ Professor Edward O Thorpe, refined Baldwin’s strategy and published a book called Beat the Dealer. It became so popular that it topped the New York Times’ bestseller list the very next week. Casinos had to actually change rules in their favor.
Stanford Wong took over where Thorpe left off. He wrote a book called Professional Blackjack, which was full of computer simulations of the game. It became the Bible for both beginners and expert players. After Wong, an IBM employee Julian Braun came up with the basic strategy of counting cards. In 1977, when a certain player used computers in his shoes to win over a hundred thousand dollars very quickly, the case was taken up by the FBI.
The game became even more popular after the release of the Academy Award-winning movie Rain Man, in which Dustin Hoffman played Tom Cruise’s autistic brother with an ability to memorize cards. In the movie, Cruise took his brother to Las Vegas to use his ability to get out of a financial mess. In reality, the movie led millions of people across the globe to the blackjack table.