Blackjack! The face cards (Jack, Queen, and King) count as 10 points, and the Ace counts as 1 or 11.
Blackjack, also known as twenty-one, is one of the most popular casino card games in the world. Much of blackjack's popularity is due to the mix of chance with elements of skill, and the publicity that surrounds card counting (keeping track of which cards have been played since the last shuffle). Blackjack's precursor was vingt-et-un ("twenty-one"), which originated in French casinos around 1700, and did not offer the 3:2 bonus for a two-card 21.
When blackjack was first introduced in the United States it wasn't very popular, so gambling houses tried offering various bonus payouts to get the players to the tables. One such bonus was a 10-to-1 payout if the player's hand consisted of the ace of spades and a black Jack (either the Jack of clubs or the Jack of spades). This hand was called a "blackjack" and the name stuck even though the bonus payout was soon abolished.
References
Blackjack
Beat the Dealer : A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One, Edward O. Thorp, 1966, ISBN 0394703103
Playing Blackjack as a Business, Lawrence Revere, 1998 (1971), ISBN 0-8184-0064-1
Professional Blackjack, Stanford Wong, 1994 (1975), ISBN 0935926216
The Theory of Blackjack, Peter Griffin, 1996 (1979), ISBN 0929712129
The World's Greatest Blackjack Book, Lance Humble and Carl Cooper, 1980, ISBN 0-285-15382-1
Blackbelt in Blackjack, Arnold Snyder, 1998 (1980), ISBN 0910575053
Million Dollar Blackjack, Ken Uston, 1994 (1981), ISBN 0-89746-068-5
Ken Uston on Blackjack, Ken Uston, 1986, ISBN 0818404116
Knock-Out Blackjack, Olaf Vancura and Ken Fuchs, 1998, ISBN 0929712315
Mathematics of gambling
The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, Richard A. Epstein, 1977, ISBN 012240761X, 215-251
Luck, Logic, and White Lies: The Mathematics of Games, Joerg Bewersdorff, 2004, ISBN 1568812108, 121-134
Links
- Encyclopaedia of Casino Twenty-One
- Blackjack Mathematics
- Blackjack Stats
- Blackjack Forum
- Interactive online calculator of probabilities and expectations for each possible card distribution in the shoe
This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
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