Who are the Best Blackjack Players in the World?

Edward Thorp

One of the most famous and respected blackjack players of all-time, Dr Edward Thorp is arguably the founding father of overcoming the house advantage in blackjack. The American national is the author of Beat the Dealer, a book that mathematically proved the house advantage was beatable when card counting.

Thorp was born in Illinois, Chicago on August 14th, 1932, but spent most of his childhood in southern California. The 90-year-old has lived an admirable life having received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles. He spent a few years working in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before writing the blackjack book.

In his 1960s book, Beat the Dealer, Thorp introduced a basic blackjack strategy chart that told players when to stand, hit, split or double down. The strategy chart is purely based on a mathematical approach depending on the player’s two initial cards and the dealer’s face-up card. Thorp used the IBM 704 computer to develop his blackjack game theory. The computer was more similar to a calculator than an actual computer, counting out the possible outcomes of every hand. His research was based on the Kelly criterion, a paper written from J. L. Kelly Jr, a researcher at Bell Labs.

Thorp used IBM 704 to devise a strategy chart that will greatly favour the player against the dealer. Particularly towards the end of a card deck that is not shuffled after every round. In the book, Thorp exposed how a player can overcome house advantage and swing the odds in their favour. Known as “The Father of Modern Card Counting”, Thorp went on to live a successful life as a mathematician, hedge fund manager, blackjack researcher and author. As a hedge fund manager for over 30 years, Thorp has a net worth of $800 million and has traded over $100 billion over the course of his career.

Ken Uston

When talking strictly about blackjack, Kenneth Senzo Usui, also known as Ken Uston, was an American professional blackjack player, strategist and author. He is most well-known for his antics at casinos during the mid-1970s.

Ken Uston was born on January 12th, 1935, in New York City to Elsie Lubitz, an Austrian native, and Senzo Usui, a Japanese businessman. He attended Yale University and received an MBA from Harvard University after graduating from Yale. During his adolescent adult years, Uston read Thorps’ Beat the Dealer book and began applying these techniques in casinos. He was nicknamed as “a genius card-counter”.

Uston is known for his flamboyant style and blackjack skills. He first started playing blackjack for bigger cash rewards after meeting professional gambler Al Francesco. The gambler had introduced Uston into his team of card counters. The team members would go to a casino and sit at many different tables. When one of the tables started showing extremely positive counts, the player would flag the “big player” to join the table. The big player would place a higher bets on the table. On the first five-day run, the team won $44,100, of which Uston’s share was $2,100. Francesco eventually promoted Uston to “Big Player”.

Several years later. Uston released a book called, The Big Player in 1977. It described the strategies used by card-counting teams to increase their chances of winning at blackjack. After the book was released, Al Francesco and his team were barred from playing in Las Vegas.

A year later, gambling was made legal in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Uston moved to the area and formed a new team of blackjack card-counting players. However, he was eventually barred from playing in most casinos in Atlantic City as well. Uston filed a lawsuit against casinos issuing that they did not have the right to bar skilled players. To date, New Jersey casinos cannot bar skilled players. However, they introduced new rules to make card-counting more difficult, including adding decks, shuffling more frequently and other measures to decrease a skilled player’s advantage.

Throughout his playing career, Uston used disguises to sneak into casinos undercover. Arnold Snyder, another professional gambler, reveals that Uston was a master of disguise, both in appearance and in playing style. The majority of an aggressive playing style but learned how to spread his bets from table minimum to table maximum on a single-deck game. Casinos can identify card counters by their “bet spread” pattern. However, Uston detected a new playing style that has been referred to as “card counting camouflage”. He continued to play blackjack until his death in a hotel in Paris in 1987.

Stanford Wong

Stanford Wong is the pseudonym for John Ferguson, who was born in 1943. Wong is a professional blackjack player, teacher and author of many gambling books. He is also responsible for the term “wong” (v.) or “wonging”, which is a technique to give players an advantage.

In 1964, Wong began playing blackjack whilst simultaneously teaching finance courses at the San Francisco State University and getting his Ph.D. from in Finance from Stanford University in California. In the final term of teaching at the school, Wong agreed a salary of $1 so that he did not have to attend any faculty meetings and could instead pursue his gambling career.

Wong developed a blackjack strategy that was made popular in the 1980s. He would stand behind a blackjack table and watch a game without placing any bets. Then, as soon as the cards became advantageous, he would step into play and start betting. Once the card count was not in the player’s favour, he would step out again. The whole process is now commonly known as “wonging”.

Many casinos have learned how to avoid “wonging players” by putting a sign up saying “No Mid-Shoe Entry”. This means any new players that want to sit at the table must first wait until the shoe is shuffled before they can begin playing.

Wong has since been included in the Blackjack Hall of Fame. He is known for his blackjack antics and has since released several gambling books from Pi Yee Press, a publishing house that he owns. The books that Wong has written are:

• Professional Blackjack (1975)
• Professional Video Poker
• Wong on Dice (2006)
• Blackjack Secrets
• Basic Blackjack (1992)
• Tournament Blackjack
• Tournament Craps
• Complete Idiot's Guide to Managing your T
• Optimal Strategy for Pai Gow Poker
• Vegas Downtown Blackjack
• Sharp Sports Betting
• Casino Tournament Strategy
• Betting Cheap Claimers
• Winning Without Counting
• Complete Idiot's Guide to Gambling Like a Pro

Don Johnson

One of the best modern-day blackjack players is Don Johnson, who is a former corporate executive and a professional gambler. Don Johnson’s most impressive feat was a six-month period between December 2010 and April 2011, where he won $15 million from Atlantic City casinos.

Johnson was born in Salem, Oregon on May 10th, 1960. He became famous in the early 2010s for an incredibly winning streak at various Atlantic City casinos. Johnson used a combination of card counting and other advantage-play techniques to win millions of dollar. He won $6 million from the Tropicana, $5 million from the Borgata and $4 million from Caesar’s. Johnson had negotiated terms with Tropicana to offer him a discount of 20% on all his losses. Thus, if he lost $500,000, he would only have to pay $400,000 of it. This allowed the professional blackjack player to swing the odds in his favour and increase his chances of winning from the casinos in Atlantic City.

After swinging the odds in his favour, Don Johnson had gained attention from significant media and news outlets. However, despite his incredibly high-winning streak, Johnson has still kept his life fairly private and out of the casino spotlight in recent years.

Keith Taft

One of the pioneers in computerized card counting was Keith Taft. The blackjack player was born in San Francisco in 1930 and grew up in the Bay Area. He was an American engineer and blackjack player that developed a computer-assisted blackjack gadget. Taft was induced into the Blackjack Hall of Fame in 2004.

Taft goes down in history as being the player to force casinos to introduce a law against electronic devices in casinos to swing the odds in favour of the player. Having graduated with a master’s degree in physics and music, Taft spent five years teaching music before he started teaching physics for three years. He had a fascination with technology and building devices. This led him to build his first blackjack device in 1972. The device weighed over 15 pounds and was called ‘George’. George was a portable computer that he used to gain an advantage in blackjack games. The device helped him keep track of cards that had been dealt and calculations for the optimal strategy for each hand. However, he did not immediately start winning. Taft lost money and stopped playing blackjack until 1975.

In 1975, the San Jose News interviewed Taft and ran a story about George. The interview gave Taft the push he needed to hit the blackjack tables again with improved versions of his computerized aid. He built smaller and more sophisticated machines that could fit in his boots, belts and under his pants and shirts. He could also communicate to the teams he worked with by using an undetectable mouthpiece.

Between 1972 and 1985, Taft used his electronic devices, card counting, hole card playing and other advantageous strategies to play blackjack professionally. He worked with many of the biggest players in blackjack history, including Al Francesco and Ken Uston.

In 1985, Nevada made the use of electronic devices while gambling illegal. Casinos were suspecting foul play and had a parked van outside of the casino ready to pick-up on any transmissions in the area. They had caught Ted Taft, Keith’s brother, using a mini camera in his belt buckle to track hole cards. Keith was brought into custody but was let go shortly afterwards as the police did not have anything on him. However, the law against electronical devices was introduced shortly afterwards. Taft went to Atlantic City to use his devices but eventually gave up playing blackjack completely. His son, Marty Taft, continued his father’s legacy by using mini gadgets to play at Atlantic City casinos, but could not replicate his father’s successes.

The MIT Blackjack Team

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) blackjack team was founded in 1979 and had a successful stint of winning millions of dollars playing blackjack. The team became famous throughout the 1980s and 1990s for card counting and teamwork playing blackjack strategies, that improved their chances of winning against the house advantage.

The MIT blackjack team was formed by a former MIT professor, known as Mr. M, who had put together a team of six MIT students that had practiced card-counting in their free time. He used their mathematical skills to develop team strategies to beat casinos.

The team was active throughout the 1980s, travelling to many Las Vegas casinos and defeating the house to win millions of dollars. The strategies that they used included tracking shuffling and card counting. Effectively, the team were barred from many casinos in Nevada, which forced them to continue playing at other casinos around the world.

The story of the MIT blackjack team was chronicled into a best-selling book, Bringing Down the House. Later on, the book was adapted into a 2008 movie, 21. The team is famous in the gambling world for their tactics to win millions of dollars from teamwork and card counting. By 2000, the MIT blackjack team had effectively disbanded as all the players and former players drifted into other pursuits.

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Although the MIT blackjack team is perhaps the most famous group of blackjack players, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are certainly the first ones to do it. In the 1950s, four US Army engineers discovered a basic strategy that could be used in blackjack. The team has since become known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by many gambling authors.

The team members included Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott. Using formulas that were based on the player’s and dealer’s up cards, the four horsemen went on to develop a strategy that loses the least amount of money to the house in the long run. The strategy was tested by Edward Thorp, who stated that it was accurate "within a couple of hundredths of a percentage point." The team went on to publish a book titled Playing Blackjack to Win in 1957. It contained a strategy chart with sections on Drawing or Standing, Doubling Down and Splitting Pairs. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were the first blackjack mathematicians to try and develop strategies to improve player chances of winning. Although their strategies were not strong enough to conclude a clear method, they improved a player’s spending to lose the least amount of money to the casino.

To Conclude

Blackjack has many different legendary names in the Blackjack Hall of Fame. Over the past seventy-odd years, there have been many blackjack players and teams that have made their mark in its recent history.

From mathematicians and strategy experts to incredible card counters and teamwork, blackjack has a rich history of many different characters. Perhaps the most influential name in the world of blackjack is Edward Thorp. The author came up with one of the first and most efficient basic blackjack strategy charts that any player could use.