Blackjack Heroes: Edward Thorp
- Filed under: Blackjack
- Date: Jul 26,2011
An open letter to Mr Edward O. Thorp
Dear Mr Thorp,
We, the blackjack players of the world, would like to thank and honor you for your immense contribution to this magnificent game. It’s a game for which we have such potent affections, such enduring admiration, and such profound respect.
At the centre of blackjack was always the ominous and ostensibly omnipotent casino: the great behemoth against which we’ve gambled an entire lifetime’s worth of fortunes. The casino was at once our greatest ally and our most feared opponent. The prospect of a victory seemed so sweet, but all too often we were greeted by the sting of a tragic loss. Our time, our sanity, our very livelihood were all expunged down the mouths and chutes of table games, slot machines and skimpy cocktail waitresses. We felt ourselves being helplessly drawn toward our own destruction.
Then you decided to apply your mathematical powers to a deck of cards. Your ground-breaking application of probability theory to blackjack helped us take down the house… again and again. You created a simple arithmetical pattern to adjudge whether or not a table was “hot”: it helped us to know when to wager high and when to hold back, it helped us to win more chips, it significantly leveled our odds against the house. Best of all? We still got to play the game we loved so much.
Of course, we realize that casinos weren’t happy that you’d found a mathematical principle based on ideas of variable change to steal the enormous profits they were raking in from patrons all over the world. We know you eventually had to disguise yourself using head-wraps and wraparound glasses just to get near the blackjack tables. We know that the seedy casino bosses atop their ivory towers had finally met their mathematical match. And you didn’t keep this theory to yourself. You published Beat the Dealer in 1962, a book that fast become a veritable blackjack bible for anyone interested in maximizing their advantage. We know that once you were done with blackjack, you applied your broad scientific knowledge to hedge funds and financial markets and made enormous profits from capitalizing on pricing irregularities.
We applaud you, Mr Thorpe, for your candor in exposing the house’s undue advantages, your courage in making the science of your studies known to all, and your creativity in presenting an advanced strategy in the language of the common man.
We know that in the fifty or so years since Beat the Dealer was published that casinos have changed national laws, introduced automatic shuffling variations, and gnashed their teeth like rabid hounds against the slew of worthy players who choose to stand against the house’s enormous advantages. Like Roger Baldwin before you, you are a veritable pioneer.
Here’s to you, Mr Thorpe!
An open letter to Mr Edward O. Thorp, Blackjack card counting champion.