Another cornerstone in blackjack history occurred in the late 1970s when Peter A. Mathematicians, statisticians, and gambling experts continued to improve basic strategy over the following decades and gradually refined it to absolute perfection. Thorp introduced a few tweaks to the strategy to improve it and went on to develop the first-ever card counting strategy, the Ten Count system, allowing blackjack players the world over to gain an edge over the house. He tested the suggested optimal plays of the engineers on an IBM computer to find out they were mostly accurate. The engineers published their findings in a statistics journal and attracted the interest of mathematician Edward O. And an apocalypse they did bring, or at least if you look at things from the casinos’ perspective, because they laid the foundations for blackjack to become a beatable game.

It was originally devised by four US Army engineers, collectively known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The history of basic strategy dates as far back as the early 1950s.

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