A Short History of Blackjack in Las Vegas
Blackjack became America’s casino card game in Las Vegas. Its story there runs from a handful of licensed clubs on Fremont Street in 1931, through four Army mathematicians who solved the game in their spare time, to a math professor whose book made the casinos change their rules.
Before Las Vegas: twenty-one
The game descends from European card games where the goal was to reach 21, known in France as vingt-et-un. In the United States it was simply called twenty-one. The popular story behind the name “blackjack” is that some early American gambling halls paid a bonus for a hand of the ace of spades with a black jack. The bonus faded away; the name stuck.
1931: Nevada deals itself in
On March 19, 1931, Governor Fred Balzar signed Assembly Bill 98 and made Nevada the home of legal, wide-open gambling. Clark County licensed its first casinos about two weeks later, a small group of clubs clustered mostly at the west end of Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas. Card games, including twenty-one, were part of the action from the start.
The Strip arrives
In April 1941, El Rancho Vegas opened on the highway south of town: the first hotel-casino on what would become the Las Vegas Strip. The Flamingo followed in December 1946. Each new resort put blackjack tables at the heart of its casino floor.
1956: four soldiers solve the game
In the early 1950s, four men serving at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott, set out to find the best way to play every blackjack hand. Working with desk calculators, they published their results in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1956. It was the first basic strategy, and it was remarkably close to what computers would later confirm. Players call them the Four Horsemen; they were inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame in 2008.
1962: the professor who beat the dealer
Mathematician Edward O. Thorp built on the Four Horsemen’s work and used computers to show that tracking the cards already played could tip the odds to the player. His 1962 book Beat the Dealer became the original guide to card counting and a bestseller.
Las Vegas noticed. On April 1, 1964, the Nevada Resort Hotel Association changed the blackjack rules, limiting doubling and pair splitting and reshuffling more often. Regular players hated the tougher game and stayed away, and the casinos soon went back to the old rules. The episode only added to blackjack’s reputation as the casino game where skill makes a difference.
Why the history matters at the table
The basic strategy those four soldiers worked out is still the foundation of good play today, and it’s exactly what our coach teaches. See it in the basic strategy chart, or practice it hand by hand in the Blackjack Trainer.