A Brief History of Card Counting

Lawrence Revere stated in his book, Playing Blackjack as a Business, that he developed his first Blackjack Strategy in 1954.  If so, it would have been the first known system developed, and predates Thorp by about eight years.  Revere stated it was a plus-minus system which counted the nines, tens and Aces as minus one, eights as zero, and the rest as plus one.  Later he developed a count identical to the Hi-Low or the point count.  By 1959 he was playing a Ten count strategy.  Again, this predates the Thorp Ten Count by three years.  He also had developed a Five count strategy similar to the Thorp Five Count.

In 1962 Dr. Ed Thorp published his famous work, Beat the Dealer, which published some of the first research in the effects of removing and adding cards to a deck.  It also included the above Five Count and Ten Count systems.  The Ten Count was different from Revere’s Ten count in the way they were counted.  Revere counted forward the tens and others, where Thorp counted backward.  The five counts were similar.

A year later, Harvey Dubner introduced his Hi-Low Count.  It was based on the research of Dr. Thorp and Julian Braun.  This was the first plus/minus system to be published.  In the second edition of Beat the Dealer, 1966, Thorp included his version of the Hi-Low called the Point Count.  Braun also published a version of the same count which he called the Plus-Minus.  This Hi-Low Count is the prototype for every counting system that has followed.  It remains the gold standard to which all other systems are compared.  In 1977, Stanford Wong developed full playing indices for the Hi-Low, which he called High-Low, in his book, Professional Blackjack.

In the same publication Wong presented the Wong Halves.  This was the first Level Three system.  It gave a value of 1 ½ to the fives, and only ½ to the 2’s, 7’s’ and     - ½ to the 9’s.  Since the value of the highest to the lowest was 3:1, this makes it a Level Three system.

In 1983 Arnold Snyder published Blackbelt in Blackjack, and introduced the unbalanced Red Seven count.  In this count, Snyder counted 2 through 6 as plus one, the red sevens as plus one, the black sevens as 0, eight and nine as 0, and ten’s and Aces as minus one.  This meant that if you start counting at zero and count through a complete deck, your ending count would be plus two.  Hence, it was unbalanced.  The purpose of the unbalanced count is to eliminate the need to estimate the number of decks remaining to be played.  By doing this, a site of potential error was eliminated- estimation of decks remaining.  It also eliminates the conversion of the running count to a true count.  There will be more about this later when the Red Seven is covered in more detail.

The rest of counting history involves variations on the themes of Ten Counts, Level One counts, Level Two and greater counts, and different unbalanced counting systems.  It seems we are searching for two things, greater accuracy and simplicity.  These seem to be mutually exclusive.  Each simplification leads to loss in accuracy.  Each attempt to become perfectly accurate makes for a more complex counting system.  Increasing complexity can lead to errors which offset the gains from the increase in complexity.  That is the Catch 21.