Sucker said:
My thoughts on the BJ hall of "fame":
Anonymity is one of the most important traits of a pro BJ player. The fact that someone's in the hall of fame is proof that he doesn't belong there!
Well ... the winners so far:
* Al Francesco, 2002, one of the founders of the concept of blackjack teams.
* Peter Griffin, 2002, mathematician, theoretical pioneer and author of The Theory of Blackjack
* Arnold Snyder, 2002, former professional player, author and editor of Blackjack Forum
* Edward O. Thorp, 2002, author of the 1960s classic Beat the Dealer
* Ken Uston, 2002, professional player and author who popularized the concept of team play, often playing in disguise and successfully suing the Atlantic City casinos for the rights of card counters
* Stanford Wong, 2002, author and popularizer of the strategy known as "Wonging"
* Tommy Hyland, 2002, manager of one of the longest-running blackjack teams
* Max Rubin, 2004, known for media reporting about gambling events, and optimizing casino comps
* Keith Taft, 2004, inventor who manufactured hidden computerized devices to aid with play
* Julian Braun, 2005, pioneering author who used computers to analyze blackjack statistics
* Lawrence Revere, 2005, author of Playing Blackjack as a Business and blackjack teacher
* James Grosjean, 2006, computer analyst and professional player, author of the classic Beyond Counting, who successfully sued casinos and the Griffin Agency
* John Chang, 2007, former MIT team manager and basis for the Mickey Rosa character in the movie 21
* Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott, (2008), collectively known as "The Four Horsemen of Aberdeen", who, while serving in the U.S. Army in the fifties, discovered and published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association the first accurate basic strategy for Blackjack, using only desk calculators.
That's a pretty distinguished list of players. Mind you, things are a little different now. I just got that list off the Wiki. You probably couldn't have done that in 2002. Shucks, I just put Stanford Wong's name in the Wiki, and found his birth date, identity, and other trivia.
:shrug:
Times change.