Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
Roger Baldwin
Roger Baldwin Baldwin became interested in Blackjack during his time in the army. His master’s degree (from Columbia University), his love for mathematics and his fascination with Blackjack led him to be the first to apply mathematical theory to the game of Blackjack in his paper ‘The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack’ published in 1956 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. It was essentially the first exploration of Blackjack of the players having the best chance of beating the dealer. Soon Baldwin and his friends, with whom he wrote the article, expanded their findings into a book, ‘Playing Blackjack to Win’ (1957). Although, Baldwin’s research was ground-breaking, it was largely inaccessible to the public because of its complexity. The public needed a simpler system.
Edward O. Thorp, the Man with the Simple Solution
Edward O. Thorp, the Man with the Simple Solution Edward Thorp, physicist and mathematician, is known to be the father of card counting. His great contribution to Blackjack is, in actual fact, a result of Thorp’s practical application of his passions (physics and mathematics). Thorp has a master’s degree in physics and a doctorate in mathematics and has worked at some of the leading universities in the US. Thorp, being a true scientist, could not accept his premise without devising an experiment to prove his results. So, along with his friend, Claude Shannon, he spent a weekend in Las Vegas…