Here is the list of the 2005 Nominees for the Blackjack Hall of Fame, with their biographies.
The nominees were selected by nomination and vote of the current members of the Blackjack Hall of Fame, and the biographies have been written and approved by the current Hall of Famers.
There are nine current Hall of Famers, including seven living members (alphabetically):
Al Francesco
Tommy Hyland
Peter Griffin*
Max Rubin
Arnold Snyder
Keith Taft
Edward O. Thorp
Ken Uston*
Stanford Wong
*passed away
All seven living members were invited to submit names of possible candidates, with biographical information and reasons for consideration. No limitations were placed on the number of names that could be submitted. All seven members then voted on their top seven choices with all members' votes counting equally. Each member's votes were provided to all other members to insure the integrity of the process.
The purpose of the Blackjack Hall of Fame is twofold: to honor people of exceptional accomplishment in this field, and to educate the public about the creativity, intelligence, drive, and courage of great players whose achievements at the tables have largely been hidden from the public. The rules for public voting require that the biographies of the nominees be posted wherever the voting takes place. Public voting is currently taking place at the Las Vegas Advisor Web site: http://www.lasvegasadvisor.com/
The Seven Nominees (in alphabetical order):
1. Ian Andersen. In his landmark 1976 book, Turning the Tables on Las Vegas, Ian Andersen was the first author to recognize that the professional blackjack player's opponent is not merely a mathematical entity, but people. Andersen was the first to describe the psychology of the match between players and casino personnel, and the first to discuss the importance for a high-roller of maintaining a friendly table image and cultivating relationships with the bosses and casino managers. He discussed how this image could allow a player to profit from playing dealer tells and limit the damage even when his advantage play was detected.
Andersen was describing his own successful playing style in his book. While other card counters had played at the highest stakes offered, he was one of the first to get away with it for very long. What Al Francesco was doing with team play and Stanford Wong was doing with table-hopping-getting away with a huge betting spread--Andersen was doing with solo play, at single-deck games, without ever leaving the table, based on his relationships with his opponents.
Andersen knew first hand the financial value of avoiding heat. In a number of unpublished texts, other professional players of the time described how his style allowed him to negotiate profitable loss-rebate deals with casinos and carry out a wide variety of innovative advantage plays around the world.
2. Julian Braun. Braun died ten years ago and his book is long out of print, so he is not widely known by the public today. But the fact is, for ten years in the early days of card counting, Braun was the man who ran the first extensive million-hand simulations of the popular card-counting systems to determine their win rates in single-deck and four-deck games, with various betting spreads, different rules sets, and with or without a side count of aces. These simulation results gave professional players, for the first time, an accurate handle on their expected win rates in real-life games.
But Julian Braun was not just another computer programmer. When modern day blackjack software sellers write their programs, there are already dozens of blackjack simulation programs out there to emulate. People can test their programs by seeing how closely they match existing programs and reproduce data that is already well known. Braun was working from scratch. He not only analyzed the problems, he had to figure out how to analyze them. Other than the data that had already been computed by Thorp on the Ten Count, Braun had no other charts or tables to guide him.
In 1963, Braun met Harvey Dubner at a computer conference in Las Vegas. Dubner had created a counting system that is now popularly known as the Hi-Lo Count. Braun recognized the simplicity of this counting system relative to Thorp's Ten Count and immediately began working on a program that could be used to develop accurate strategy indices for it. Thorp recognized Braun's work on Dubner's counting system as so valuable that he included it in the revised 1966 edition of Beat the Dealer. The Hi-Lo Count has gone on to become the most widely-used counting system among both amateur and professional players because of its combined power and simplicity.
Braun's programs were then employed by Lawrence Revere in creating all of his counting systems, as well as by Lance Humble in developing the Hi-Opt systems. From 1966 through 1975 these systems were the most accurate and powerful counting systems available. Every professional player of that time, including most of the current Hall of Famers, used one of these systems.
3. Bill Erb. Al Francesco has named Bill Erb as one of the two greatest players he has ever worked with, both in terms of creativity and sheer amount of money won. Ken Uston acknowledged Erb in his book, Ken Uston on Blackjack, and, in another of his books, paid him the "high compliment" of describing one of Erb's great plays as his own.
A few stories about Erb that can be shared with the public:
Al Francesco initially met Erb in 1972 while playing poker and realized immediately that Erb was a very savvy gambler. For three weeks he trained Erb-who had never counted cards-to play the Revere Advanced Point Count; then departed with him on a playing trip to Panama. There they played the 4-deck games, mostly with $100 maximums, and over a period of three weeks won $38,000.
Francesco described one hand on this trip that convinced him that Erb was beyond the norm in talent. Francesco had finished playing and wandered over to the table where Erb was playing. At this casino, the table limit was $200 per hand, and Erb had out five hands of the table max. As Francesco approached, Erb had just been dealt four hands totaling between 18 and 20. The dealer had a ten up and at this casino the dealers did not take a hole card until the players had completed their hands. Francesco looked at the table, pointed to the dealer's ten up, and said, "Hit." The dealer slid the next card out of the shoe, which turned out to be an ace, giving himself a blackjack. As he began sweeping the bets off the table, Erb said, "What the hell are you doing?!" The dealer seemed confused and started to point to his blackjack, and Erb said, "I haven't made a single decision yet! That guy can't tell you how to play my hands!" The dealer called over the pit boss, explained the problem, and the boss asked Erb how he wanted to play his hands. Erb said that all of his hands were fine, except for the two nines, which he wanted to split. The boss told the dealer to split the nines and to put the ace he had dealt to himself on one of them. Then he hit the other nine with a ten, giving Erb two hands of 20 and 19. The dealer then dealt a card to complete his own hand--a seven, making a 17 total. Erb was paid off on all six bets, a $1200 win, instead of losing $1000.
In 1973, Francesco had a Big Player team in Vegas. There were two groups of six spotters. When one group finished a play early, they contacted Francesco, and Al told them to go to the Aladdin where Erb was BPing on two-deck games. So, Erb had twelve spotters in a casino with two-deck games where big advantages were occurring much faster than he could keep up with them. Instead of giving up on these "excess" advantageous bets, he began to have the pit bosses place bets for him on other tables. He played for hours, three to four tables at a time, three to four hands of table max on each table, orchestrating bosses to place bets and then calling across the pit to tell them how to play the hands. (It was this play that Uston described as his own.) Erb is well known to professional players for his ability to think fast under pressure and for trying almost anything to get the money.
In 1974, Francesco and Erb found a casino in Dieppe, France with 4-deck games dealt literally to the bottom. The casino had only three blackjack tables, with $100 maximums. Over a period of ten days, with each placing max bets of 3 x $100, they had won a combined total of $220,000 (US), when the owner of the casino called off the game, explaining that the house did not have the money to pay them. The players did eventually collect all but about $20K from the casino. According to Francesco, "This is the only instance I know of where two card counters literally put a casino out of business."
Erb is also known as an expert hole card player, who won tens of thousands in plays at small casinos with $50 maximums. He was able to take much greater amounts of money out of casinos that could afford big action. He was the first known professional blackjack player to negotiate and milk loss rebates. In the early to mid-80s, Erb played table limit stakes for several years at major Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe casinos where he had negotiated loss rebates of up to 50%.
4. The Four Horsemen: Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott. In 1956, they developed and published the first accurate basic strategy for blackjack, bravely refuting the work of John Scarne, the predominant gambling author of the time. They had spent three years crunching numbers on mechanical adding machines to develop this strategy. They also published in 1957, five years prior to Thorp, the first card counting strategy; it appeared in their book, Playing Blackjack to Win, in a chapter titled "Using the Exposed Cards to Improve Your Chances." Thorp acknowledged in Beat the Dealer that it was the work of the Four Horsemen that initially encouraged him to use a high-speed computer to take their findings further.
5. James Grosjean. The youngest player ever to be nominated to the Blackjack Hall of Fame, at 35, James Grosjean began his playing career when he was a student, counting cards at low limits on shoe games. Then he walked by a table where a dealer was inadvertently exposing hole cards. He went home and wrote a program to determine the correct playing strategy and potential advantage from applying it. Within three weeks he had turned his $1000 bankroll into tens of thousands.
As new types of games began appearing in casinos in the late 1990s, Grosjean became one of a handful of professional players who recognized their potential value to players, and the first to analyze them in detail. A small portion of this analysis was published in his 2000 Beyond Counting, which was instrumental in expanding opportunities for professional players. One of his discoveries was a radical correction of the calculated edge available from optimal hole-card strategy with flat-betting. Numerous authors had reported the maximum edge at roughly 9.9%. Grosjean showed it was really over 13%. Other casino games for which he provided analyses in his book include Caribbean Stud, Let It Ride, Three Card Poker, Casino War, mini-baccarat, and the Big 6 Wheel.
Grosjean also developed a computer with Hall of Famer Keith Taft and his son, Marty Taft, for use in locations where such devices were still legal. The strategy they used was one of the strongest legal advantage plays ever deployed in a casino. Taft characterizes Grosjean's programming skills as "absolutely brilliant."
Grosjean is highly regarded by professional players not only for his creativity and versatility, but also for his perfectionism and aggressiveness of attack at the tables. But he has done more with his talent than win a lot of money. Recently he brought his determination, analytic skills, and meticulous attention to detail to bear in a successful lawsuit against Imperial Palace for player harassment, at significant risk to his career. He was recently awarded $690,000 by the jury in this suit. This lawsuit, and another one he has pending against Caesars, were directly responsible for changes in policy at the Nevada Gaming Control Board and Las Vegas Metro Police regarding the treatment of players.
6. Lawrence Revere. In 1969 Lawrence Revere self-published Playing Blackjack as a Business. It was a 36-page spiral bound pamphlet that revolutionized the way that professional players counted cards. It was revolutionary in its radical simplification of some really complicated methods.
In the 1962 edition of Beat the Dealer, Thorp had provided a Ten Count system in which the player needed to keep counts of both tens and non-tens and then compute a ratio in order to make betting and playing decisions. In the 1966 edition, he provided his Complete Point Count system, in which the player needed to keep the plus/minus Dubner count, plus a backwards-running count of the exact number of cards remaining to be played in order to adjust the running count for the depth of the deal.
Thorp also proposed a simple technique of dividing a point count by the approximate number of decks remaining to be played, but provided only betting information with no strategy indices for this technique. Revere realized that the simplicity of this proposed "true count adjustment" method made it superior for actual use in the casinos.
Revere created a number of counting systems based on this simple "true count" method, using Julian Braun's programs to devise full sets of playing indices for each. For five years (1969-1974), virtually every professional player converted to one of Revere's counting systems. Revere's approach has been employed by virtually every serious balanced point count system developer since, including Wong, Humble, Uston, and Snyder.
Revere was also known as a consummate professional player, deploying many techniques he never wrote about. Before he died in 1977, he tracked shuffles and played hole cards and tells. Players of the time describe him as someone who could go into a casino and get the money. He was barred from virtually every casino in Las Vegas, but continued until his death to play in disguise.
7. Allan Wilson. Allan Wilson was a mathematician at General Dynamics in San Diego, California when he became one of the early computer analysts of blackjack prior to the publication of Beat the Dealer. His 1965 book, The Casino Gambler's Guide, was the first to provide blackjack card counters with clear and practical explanations of standard deviation, risk of ruin, and the Kelly Criterion, as well as easy-to-use guidelines for bet sizing based on bankroll when an advantage player is using a betting spread. What was particularly notable was how simply Wilson was able to describe these difficult mathematical concepts for players of average math ability.
This type of information had never before been provided in texts on card counting. And it was many years more before other blackjack authors paid much attention to these subjects. Throughout the early history of card counting-most of the 1960s and 1970s-professional players used the information in Wilson's book to calculate bankroll requirements and betting approaches. Wilson's book also contained some of the first computer simulations comparing blackjack card counting systems.
The nominees were selected by nomination and vote of the current members of the Blackjack Hall of Fame, and the biographies have been written and approved by the current Hall of Famers.
There are nine current Hall of Famers, including seven living members (alphabetically):
Al Francesco
Tommy Hyland
Peter Griffin*
Max Rubin
Arnold Snyder
Keith Taft
Edward O. Thorp
Ken Uston*
Stanford Wong
*passed away
All seven living members were invited to submit names of possible candidates, with biographical information and reasons for consideration. No limitations were placed on the number of names that could be submitted. All seven members then voted on their top seven choices with all members' votes counting equally. Each member's votes were provided to all other members to insure the integrity of the process.
The purpose of the Blackjack Hall of Fame is twofold: to honor people of exceptional accomplishment in this field, and to educate the public about the creativity, intelligence, drive, and courage of great players whose achievements at the tables have largely been hidden from the public. The rules for public voting require that the biographies of the nominees be posted wherever the voting takes place. Public voting is currently taking place at the Las Vegas Advisor Web site: http://www.lasvegasadvisor.com/
The Seven Nominees (in alphabetical order):
1. Ian Andersen. In his landmark 1976 book, Turning the Tables on Las Vegas, Ian Andersen was the first author to recognize that the professional blackjack player's opponent is not merely a mathematical entity, but people. Andersen was the first to describe the psychology of the match between players and casino personnel, and the first to discuss the importance for a high-roller of maintaining a friendly table image and cultivating relationships with the bosses and casino managers. He discussed how this image could allow a player to profit from playing dealer tells and limit the damage even when his advantage play was detected.
Andersen was describing his own successful playing style in his book. While other card counters had played at the highest stakes offered, he was one of the first to get away with it for very long. What Al Francesco was doing with team play and Stanford Wong was doing with table-hopping-getting away with a huge betting spread--Andersen was doing with solo play, at single-deck games, without ever leaving the table, based on his relationships with his opponents.
Andersen knew first hand the financial value of avoiding heat. In a number of unpublished texts, other professional players of the time described how his style allowed him to negotiate profitable loss-rebate deals with casinos and carry out a wide variety of innovative advantage plays around the world.
2. Julian Braun. Braun died ten years ago and his book is long out of print, so he is not widely known by the public today. But the fact is, for ten years in the early days of card counting, Braun was the man who ran the first extensive million-hand simulations of the popular card-counting systems to determine their win rates in single-deck and four-deck games, with various betting spreads, different rules sets, and with or without a side count of aces. These simulation results gave professional players, for the first time, an accurate handle on their expected win rates in real-life games.
But Julian Braun was not just another computer programmer. When modern day blackjack software sellers write their programs, there are already dozens of blackjack simulation programs out there to emulate. People can test their programs by seeing how closely they match existing programs and reproduce data that is already well known. Braun was working from scratch. He not only analyzed the problems, he had to figure out how to analyze them. Other than the data that had already been computed by Thorp on the Ten Count, Braun had no other charts or tables to guide him.
In 1963, Braun met Harvey Dubner at a computer conference in Las Vegas. Dubner had created a counting system that is now popularly known as the Hi-Lo Count. Braun recognized the simplicity of this counting system relative to Thorp's Ten Count and immediately began working on a program that could be used to develop accurate strategy indices for it. Thorp recognized Braun's work on Dubner's counting system as so valuable that he included it in the revised 1966 edition of Beat the Dealer. The Hi-Lo Count has gone on to become the most widely-used counting system among both amateur and professional players because of its combined power and simplicity.
Braun's programs were then employed by Lawrence Revere in creating all of his counting systems, as well as by Lance Humble in developing the Hi-Opt systems. From 1966 through 1975 these systems were the most accurate and powerful counting systems available. Every professional player of that time, including most of the current Hall of Famers, used one of these systems.
3. Bill Erb. Al Francesco has named Bill Erb as one of the two greatest players he has ever worked with, both in terms of creativity and sheer amount of money won. Ken Uston acknowledged Erb in his book, Ken Uston on Blackjack, and, in another of his books, paid him the "high compliment" of describing one of Erb's great plays as his own.
A few stories about Erb that can be shared with the public:
Al Francesco initially met Erb in 1972 while playing poker and realized immediately that Erb was a very savvy gambler. For three weeks he trained Erb-who had never counted cards-to play the Revere Advanced Point Count; then departed with him on a playing trip to Panama. There they played the 4-deck games, mostly with $100 maximums, and over a period of three weeks won $38,000.
Francesco described one hand on this trip that convinced him that Erb was beyond the norm in talent. Francesco had finished playing and wandered over to the table where Erb was playing. At this casino, the table limit was $200 per hand, and Erb had out five hands of the table max. As Francesco approached, Erb had just been dealt four hands totaling between 18 and 20. The dealer had a ten up and at this casino the dealers did not take a hole card until the players had completed their hands. Francesco looked at the table, pointed to the dealer's ten up, and said, "Hit." The dealer slid the next card out of the shoe, which turned out to be an ace, giving himself a blackjack. As he began sweeping the bets off the table, Erb said, "What the hell are you doing?!" The dealer seemed confused and started to point to his blackjack, and Erb said, "I haven't made a single decision yet! That guy can't tell you how to play my hands!" The dealer called over the pit boss, explained the problem, and the boss asked Erb how he wanted to play his hands. Erb said that all of his hands were fine, except for the two nines, which he wanted to split. The boss told the dealer to split the nines and to put the ace he had dealt to himself on one of them. Then he hit the other nine with a ten, giving Erb two hands of 20 and 19. The dealer then dealt a card to complete his own hand--a seven, making a 17 total. Erb was paid off on all six bets, a $1200 win, instead of losing $1000.
In 1973, Francesco had a Big Player team in Vegas. There were two groups of six spotters. When one group finished a play early, they contacted Francesco, and Al told them to go to the Aladdin where Erb was BPing on two-deck games. So, Erb had twelve spotters in a casino with two-deck games where big advantages were occurring much faster than he could keep up with them. Instead of giving up on these "excess" advantageous bets, he began to have the pit bosses place bets for him on other tables. He played for hours, three to four tables at a time, three to four hands of table max on each table, orchestrating bosses to place bets and then calling across the pit to tell them how to play the hands. (It was this play that Uston described as his own.) Erb is well known to professional players for his ability to think fast under pressure and for trying almost anything to get the money.
In 1974, Francesco and Erb found a casino in Dieppe, France with 4-deck games dealt literally to the bottom. The casino had only three blackjack tables, with $100 maximums. Over a period of ten days, with each placing max bets of 3 x $100, they had won a combined total of $220,000 (US), when the owner of the casino called off the game, explaining that the house did not have the money to pay them. The players did eventually collect all but about $20K from the casino. According to Francesco, "This is the only instance I know of where two card counters literally put a casino out of business."
Erb is also known as an expert hole card player, who won tens of thousands in plays at small casinos with $50 maximums. He was able to take much greater amounts of money out of casinos that could afford big action. He was the first known professional blackjack player to negotiate and milk loss rebates. In the early to mid-80s, Erb played table limit stakes for several years at major Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe casinos where he had negotiated loss rebates of up to 50%.
4. The Four Horsemen: Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott. In 1956, they developed and published the first accurate basic strategy for blackjack, bravely refuting the work of John Scarne, the predominant gambling author of the time. They had spent three years crunching numbers on mechanical adding machines to develop this strategy. They also published in 1957, five years prior to Thorp, the first card counting strategy; it appeared in their book, Playing Blackjack to Win, in a chapter titled "Using the Exposed Cards to Improve Your Chances." Thorp acknowledged in Beat the Dealer that it was the work of the Four Horsemen that initially encouraged him to use a high-speed computer to take their findings further.
5. James Grosjean. The youngest player ever to be nominated to the Blackjack Hall of Fame, at 35, James Grosjean began his playing career when he was a student, counting cards at low limits on shoe games. Then he walked by a table where a dealer was inadvertently exposing hole cards. He went home and wrote a program to determine the correct playing strategy and potential advantage from applying it. Within three weeks he had turned his $1000 bankroll into tens of thousands.
As new types of games began appearing in casinos in the late 1990s, Grosjean became one of a handful of professional players who recognized their potential value to players, and the first to analyze them in detail. A small portion of this analysis was published in his 2000 Beyond Counting, which was instrumental in expanding opportunities for professional players. One of his discoveries was a radical correction of the calculated edge available from optimal hole-card strategy with flat-betting. Numerous authors had reported the maximum edge at roughly 9.9%. Grosjean showed it was really over 13%. Other casino games for which he provided analyses in his book include Caribbean Stud, Let It Ride, Three Card Poker, Casino War, mini-baccarat, and the Big 6 Wheel.
Grosjean also developed a computer with Hall of Famer Keith Taft and his son, Marty Taft, for use in locations where such devices were still legal. The strategy they used was one of the strongest legal advantage plays ever deployed in a casino. Taft characterizes Grosjean's programming skills as "absolutely brilliant."
Grosjean is highly regarded by professional players not only for his creativity and versatility, but also for his perfectionism and aggressiveness of attack at the tables. But he has done more with his talent than win a lot of money. Recently he brought his determination, analytic skills, and meticulous attention to detail to bear in a successful lawsuit against Imperial Palace for player harassment, at significant risk to his career. He was recently awarded $690,000 by the jury in this suit. This lawsuit, and another one he has pending against Caesars, were directly responsible for changes in policy at the Nevada Gaming Control Board and Las Vegas Metro Police regarding the treatment of players.
6. Lawrence Revere. In 1969 Lawrence Revere self-published Playing Blackjack as a Business. It was a 36-page spiral bound pamphlet that revolutionized the way that professional players counted cards. It was revolutionary in its radical simplification of some really complicated methods.
In the 1962 edition of Beat the Dealer, Thorp had provided a Ten Count system in which the player needed to keep counts of both tens and non-tens and then compute a ratio in order to make betting and playing decisions. In the 1966 edition, he provided his Complete Point Count system, in which the player needed to keep the plus/minus Dubner count, plus a backwards-running count of the exact number of cards remaining to be played in order to adjust the running count for the depth of the deal.
Thorp also proposed a simple technique of dividing a point count by the approximate number of decks remaining to be played, but provided only betting information with no strategy indices for this technique. Revere realized that the simplicity of this proposed "true count adjustment" method made it superior for actual use in the casinos.
Revere created a number of counting systems based on this simple "true count" method, using Julian Braun's programs to devise full sets of playing indices for each. For five years (1969-1974), virtually every professional player converted to one of Revere's counting systems. Revere's approach has been employed by virtually every serious balanced point count system developer since, including Wong, Humble, Uston, and Snyder.
Revere was also known as a consummate professional player, deploying many techniques he never wrote about. Before he died in 1977, he tracked shuffles and played hole cards and tells. Players of the time describe him as someone who could go into a casino and get the money. He was barred from virtually every casino in Las Vegas, but continued until his death to play in disguise.
7. Allan Wilson. Allan Wilson was a mathematician at General Dynamics in San Diego, California when he became one of the early computer analysts of blackjack prior to the publication of Beat the Dealer. His 1965 book, The Casino Gambler's Guide, was the first to provide blackjack card counters with clear and practical explanations of standard deviation, risk of ruin, and the Kelly Criterion, as well as easy-to-use guidelines for bet sizing based on bankroll when an advantage player is using a betting spread. What was particularly notable was how simply Wilson was able to describe these difficult mathematical concepts for players of average math ability.
This type of information had never before been provided in texts on card counting. And it was many years more before other blackjack authors paid much attention to these subjects. Throughout the early history of card counting-most of the 1960s and 1970s-professional players used the information in Wilson's book to calculate bankroll requirements and betting approaches. Wilson's book also contained some of the first computer simulations comparing blackjack card counting systems.
