Blackjack History

The game of blackjack is commonly thought to have derived from the French parlour game vingt-et-un, or 21. Popular amongst the French in the early eighteenth century, vingt-et-un travelled to the United States where the game’s moniker was changed to blackjack based on the original rules.

In the 1950s and 1960s after the legalized gambling boom, everyone wanted to learn how to play blackjack to beat the house. Books explaining complicated blackjack theory and strategy were published, immediately hitting the best-seller list. One such book encouraged blackjack fans to employ a mathematical strategy to get a slight advantage over the house. The imagination of the public was fired and blackjack soon became the most popular casino game in the United States with millions trying their luck at casinos all over the country.

However with all the success that blackjack players were enjoying over the casinos, it wasn’t long before the casinos attempted to change the rules, making it more difficult to calculate the odds on a game of blackjack. The subsequent public backlash however inevitably forced the casinos to return to the original rules of blackjack and to employ alternative methods for ensuring the house edge remained healthy. These included introducing additional packs of cards into each game and the use of shuffling machines used to shuffle the cards more frequently, thereby breaking up patterns that made card counting an effective practice adopted by many blackjack fans.