The Blackjack Hall of Fame: Edward O. Thorp
The Father of Blackjack Card Counting
Of all the players who were voted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame since its inception in 2003, Edward O. Thorp may be the greatest of them all. Strictly speaking, he wasn't the best active blackjack player, but he has been widely credited for creating blackjack card counting and, as such, no one who came before or after has left as significant an imprint on the game.
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It was Thorp's book, "Beat the Dealer," that introduced blackjack card counting to the general public. This book — published an amazing 45 years ago — offered the world a mathematical system for beating the casino in blackjack. Using computers as a tool, Thorp's "Ten Count System" was the first blackjack card-counting system that worked and that was systematically spelled out and explained. It is no secret that all serious blackjack card-counting strategies today use Thorp's methods as a foundation. At first, the Ten Count System proved to be unwieldy, particularly when the blackjack casinos — in a swift counter-attack — increased the number of decks from one to four, but it was quickly followed by Thorp's next system, the High-Low Count, which established itself as more practical and effective (and which was publicized in a second edition of "Beat the Dealer").
Thorp Made Winning at Blackjack Possible
Edward O. Thorp was born in 1932 and was a successful university math professor before tackling the world of casino blackjack gambling. Thorp used one of the earliest IBM computers to break down the game of blackjack into its mathematical components and to figure out the probabilities and statistics of winning at blackjack. This is the essence of card counting — the goal was to swing the advantage from a maximum of about 5% for the house (for a really bad player) down to a 1% advantage for the player. Thorp achieved the goal.
| Once he came up with what he thought was a workable system, he took his knowledge into the casino along with $10,000 in seed money. His blackjack theories, it turned out, worked in practice, too, and he won enough money in his first outing to draw the attention of casino personnel; he was shown the door. Soon afterward he wrote the book that was to change blackjack history and launch the age of blackjack card counting. |
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Thorp's acumen for numbers didn't start and end with blackjack. Using the same kind of probability and statistical computations, Thorp moved from the blackjack casino to the stock market. There, too, he encountered success and in 1967 he published the book, "Beat the Market." In this book, prospective investors were taught how to "read" the stock market and "play it" in a way that was similar to reading the cards and playing the game of blackjack. Thorp stayed in the investment business and made a fortune in the securities market and with his own hedge fund. He became a rich man as a result of his mathematical applications. As icing on the cake, he was made one of the inaugural members of the Blackjack Hall of Fame.
