The Origin of Chemin de Fer
The card game of black jack was introduced to the United States of America in the 1800’s but it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that a system was created to beat the house in twenty-one. This material is going to grab a swift peak at the birth of that strategy, Counting Cards.
When casino gambling was authorized in Nevada in ‘34, chemin de fer screamed into recognition and was most commonly played with one or two decks. Roger Baldwin published a paper in ‘56 which described how to reduce the house advantage built on probability and stats which was quite complicated for people who weren’t math experts.
In 1962, Dr. Thorp used an IBM 704 computer to refine the mathematical strategy in Baldwin’s paper and also developed the first card counting techniques. Dr. Ed Thorp wrote a book called "Beat the Dealer" which summarized card counting techniques and the practices for lowering the casino edge.
This created a large increase in chemin de fer players at the US casinos who were attempting to implement Dr. Thorp’s techniques, much to the alarm of the casinos. The technique was challenging to understand and complicated to execute and thusly heightened the earnings for the casinos as more and more people took to playing black jack.
However this massive increase in earnings wasn’t to last as the players became more refined and more insightful and the system was further refined. In the 1980’s a bunch of students from MIT made counting cards a part of the everyday vocabulary. Since then the casinos have brought in numerous methods to counteract card counters including but not limited to, more than one deck, shoes, constant shuffle machines, and speculation has it, sophisticated computer programs to scrutinize actions and detect "cheaters". While not prohibited being caught counting cards will get you blocked from the majority of casinos in vegas.
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