Blackjack Hall of Fame: Lawrence Revere
A Card Shark and Revered Blackjack Teacher
More than anyone else, Lawrence Revere was Mr. Blackjack — a man for whom blackjack was his entire life. Revere's name was synonymous with his beloved game, which is ironic since Lawrence Revere was not his real name. He was born Griffith Owens, and Lawrence Revere was just one of a few pseudonyms that he used over the course of his lifetime.
Revere was a revered player in the 1960s and 70s and died in 1977. Twenty-eight years later he was inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame.
He Invented the Blackjack Basic Strategy Chart
Gambling was Revere's life — he made his living as a pit boss and a dealer before moving to professional gambling for his livelihood. He was an expert blackjack card counter and taught his craft to hundreds of other counters-in-training. He had a reputation as a hustler (his numerous pseudonyms indicated this possibility) but his accomplishments were looked upon in a more positive light over the years.
The regular, non-card-counting blackjack player — the everyman who plays according to the basic strategy — can thank Lawrence Revere every time he wins a hand at blackjack, for it was Revere who invented the blackjack basic strategy chart, the color-coded graph that you find online and in books that tells you exactly when to hit and stand when you're playing blackjack. Decades later, millions of amateur blackjack players still refer to Revere's chart whenever they sit down to play blackjack in a land-based or online casino.
Revere and Blackjack Go Hand in Hand
When he was only a teen, Lawrence Revere was already a card shark. He ran a back-room blackjack game at the age of 13 and never looked back. Like many blackjack aficionados, Revered majored in Math while he was a university — blackjack and mathematics always seemed to go hand in hand, and a fascination with one always seemed to lead to an attraction to the other.
Of all the current Blackjack Hall of Famers, Revere's career as a professional gambler goes back the furthest — he was already making money as a professional blackjack gambler in the early 1940s. Twenty-five years later Revere sealed his fate as a blackjack legend with the publication of his book "Playing Blackjack as a Business."
Revere's landmark book is arguably the best how-to book every written about blackjack and card counting.
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An Indelible Part of Blackjack History
"Playing Blackjack as a Business" reached out to the general public and explained in detail a number of different blackjack card-counting systems, including the famous Revere Point Count, which he developed along with Julian Braun (a fellow Blackjack Hall of Famer). It was in this book that Revere first published his groundbreaking blackjack basic strategy charts, which are still relevant and useful today. Revere's "Reverse Plus Minus Strategy" was so important that Edward O. Thorp included it in his own seminal work, "Beat the Dealer." Forty years after publication, Lawrence Revere's book "Playing Blackjack as a Business" is still the all-time best-selling book on the subject of blackjack and Lawrence Revere's name is firmly imprinted in blackjack history.
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