History of Blackjack Card Counting Systems
by Jerry Patterson
Part 2: Harvey
Dubner - The Forgotten Man of Blackjack
It
is interesting to speculate on what might have transpired if nothing more would
have been done in the development of card counting systems following the 1962
publication of Thorp's book. The game certainly would not have been as popular
because of reasons noted in earlier articles and few, if any, additional
blackjack books might have been published. Thorp and his cumbersome ten-count
system probably would have been forgotten and you may never have heard of
Lawrence Revere, Ken Uston, Lance Humble, Richard Canfield, or Jerry Patterson.
But
additional work was done and it was performed by a man who has since become
"the forgotten man of blackjack." His name is Harvey Dubner and he
invented the Point-count System - the system which led to scores of
developmental projects, over 100 published blackjack books with the end not yet
in sight, blackjack teams, concealed computers and shuffletracking.
Why
isn't Harvey Dubner recognized for his point-count system - a fantastic
contribution to the world of blackjack? What is the impact of this early
breakthrough on the current state of the art in blackjack card counting systems?
To
find the answer to these two questions, we must start by moving forward one year
after the first edition of Thorp's book was published in 1962 - to the Fall
Joint Computer Conference held in Las Vegas in 1963. On a whim, the conference
organizers decided to include a Panel Session on "Using Computers in Games
of Chance and Skill." Ed Thorp, author of the all-time best selling
blackjack book, Beat The Dealer, was designated as Chairman of the Panel and
experts on the various casino games, including blackjack, roulette and baccarat,
were invited to speak, this author among them. You can guess who stole the show
- Harvey Dubner with his description of his High/Low Point-count method.
I'll
never forget that session for as long as I live. Not realizing that most "computerniks"
(as they were called at that time borrowing the suffix from the Russian Sputnik
satellite) were also inveterate blackjack players, they scheduled the Panel
Discussion in one of their smaller meeting rooms. The room filled up and
overflowed 45 minutes before the session was scheduled to start! Hundreds of
conference attendees were pushing and shoving to get into the room. >p>
The crowd, of course, had been drawn by Thorp. They were expecting revelations
on the game and anticipated using his imparted wisdom immediately following the
session to make a killing at the blackjack tables. Thorp moderated the panel and
introduced the speakers one by one.
Allen
Wilson, who subsequently wrote The Casino Gamblers Guide, described his approach
to finding biased roulette wheels and then presented an interesting graphic on
the evolution of blackjack's basic strategy. Beginning with the original
strategy derived by Cantey, McDermott, Maisel and Baldwin, his graphic displayed
the advantage the player achieved - beginning with slightly minus and increasing
up to around 0.1 slightly positive as new studies were conducted by various
groups and individuals between 1958 and 1963.
After
one or two more presentations, Tony C. presented our findings resulting from the
first blackjack computer simulation model I had programmed for the IBM 709
computer. They were significant mainly because we had validated Thorp's
ten-count system with a totally different method than his mathematical
formulation - playing it in over 500,000 simulated hands.
Then
Dubner was introduced. After a short background discussion on how he had come to
invent the point-count method leading to advantage blackjack, he described the
approach. Dubner kept a count of remaining high cards (10,J,Q,K,A) and low cards
(2,3,4,5,6) as the cards were played and divided its difference by total cards
left to play. He called the result the High-Low Ratio and used this to size his
bet.
His
presentation was enthusiastically received by the standing room only crowd and
he was given a round of applause at its conclusion. At the conclusion of the
panel discussion, Dubner was mobbed by the crowd all wanting copies of his
handout on the point-count system. Here at last, many were saying, is a system
that is practical, that can actually be used in the real world of casino play.
This
interesting historical background lays the groundwork for describing the impact
of Dubner's breakthrough on the evolution of the scores of point count system
development projects that followed. They start with Thorp and Julian Braun and
proceed right up to the new millennium with the publication of the latest
blackjack book. Thorp incorporated Dubner's system into the second edition of
Beat the Dealer published in 1966 and offered some ideas for improvement. Did he
have Dubner's permission? He did acknowledge Dubner as its developer but, and
this is my opinion, to justify including the system in his second edition and
thus putting it in the public domain, he indicated that many of the readers of
his book had also invented point-count systems. To prove this point he mentioned
the publication of an ad in a Las Vegas newspaper offering a point-count system
for $1,000.
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