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3 unusual facts about Card counting


Card counting

From the early days of card-counting, some players have been hugely successful, including Al Francesco, the inventor of blackjack team play and the man who taught Ken Uston how to count cards, and Tommy Hyland, manager of the longest-running blackjack team in history.

Stanford Wong first proposed the idea of back-counting, and the term "Wong" comes from his name.

In 1979 Ken Uston, a Blackjack Hall of Fame inductee, filed a lawsuit against an Atlantic City casino, claiming that casinos did not have the right to bar skilled players.


Ben Mezrich

This book tells the story of a group of students from MIT who bet on blackjack games using a sophisticated card counting system, earning millions of dollars at casinos in Las Vegas and other gambling centers in the United States and the Caribbean.


see also

Breaking Vegas

The episode "Professor Blackjack" is about MIT professor Edward O. Thorp's computer-based research on the Kelly criterion that was applied in real Vegas casinos in the form of computer aided card-counting schemes with very successful results.

Darwin Ortiz

During that time, he initially supported himself playing blackjack (using card counting techniques) and as an instructor at Harry Lorayne's memory school in New York.