The Blackjack Hall of Fame honors the greatest blackjack experts, authors, and professional players in history. It was launched in 2002, and its physical premises are in San Diego, California.
The Blackjack Hall of Fame honors the greatest blackjack experts, authors, and professional players in history. It was launched in 2002, and its physical premises are in San Diego, California.
The Blackjack Hall of Fame is housed at the Barona Casino, in San Diego, California. The Barona Casino awards to each inductee a permanent lifetime comp for full room, food, and beverage, in exchange for each member’s agreement never to play on Barona’s tables. [1]
In winter 2002, a diverse selection of 21 blackjack experts, authors, and professional players were nominated for membership in the Blackjack Hall of Fame. The public was allowed to vote for about a month through the Internet. The final voting was completed at the January 2003 Blackjack Ball, an event open only to selected professional blackjack players and experts and hosted by blackjack author Max Rubin, [1] at which the first 7 members were inducted. [1]
The following year, at the 2004 Blackjack Ball, 2 more inductees were added, again with primary voting done by professional gamblers at the Ball. Nomination of candidates, after 2006, has become the permanent responsibility of the members of the Blackjack Hall of Fame themselves, [2] while the vote on the candidates that have been nominated is conducted by the invitees to the Blackjack Ball. [3] The Hall of Famers inducted 2 more members per year through 2006. Since then they only nominate 1 person per year.
However, in late 2007, 4 new members -- "The Four Horsemen" -- were inducted in the Hall of Fame "as a group". [4]
The current members of the Blackjack Hall of Fame are the following:
Blackjack is a casino banking game. It is the most widely played casino banking game in the world. It uses decks of 52 cards and descends from a global family of casino banking games known as "twenty-one". This family of card games also includes the European games vingt-et-un and pontoon, and the Russian game Ochko. Blackjack players do not compete against each other. The game is a comparing card game where each player competes against the dealer.
Card counting is a blackjack strategy used to determine whether the player or the dealer has an advantage on the next hand.
The MIT Blackjack Team was a group of students and ex-students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and other leading colleges who used card counting techniques and more sophisticated strategies to beat casinos at blackjack worldwide. The team and its successors operated successfully from 1979 through the beginning of the 21st century. Many other blackjack teams have been formed around the world with the goal of beating the casinos.
Edward Oakley Thorp is an American mathematics professor, author, hedge fund manager, and blackjack researcher. He pioneered the modern applications of probability theory, including the harnessing of very small correlations for reliable financial gain.
Ken Uston was an American blackjack player, strategist and author, credited with popularizing the concept of team play at blackjack. During the early to mid-1970s he gained widespread notoriety for perfecting techniques to do team card counting in numerous casinos worldwide, earning millions of dollars from the casinos, with some bets as high as $12,000 on a single hand.
John Ferguson, known by his pen name, Stanford Wong, is a gambling author best known for his book Professional Blackjack, first published in 1975. Wong's computer program "Blackjack Analyzer", initially created for personal use, was one of the first pieces of commercially available blackjack odds analyzing software. Wong has appeared on TV multiple times as a blackjack tournament contestant or as a gambling expert. He owns a publishing house, Pi Yee Press, which has published books by other gambling authors including King Yao.
Michael Shackleford,, also known as "The Wizard of Odds", is an American mathematician and an actuary. He is best known for his professional analysis of the mathematics of the casino games. He is also an adjunct professor of actuarial science and mathematics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He became interested in the mathematics of gambling at a young age after reading John Scarne's Guide to Casino Gambling.
Arnold Snyder was a professional gambler and gambling author. He was elected by professional blackjack players as one of the seven original inductees into the Blackjack Hall of Fame – hosted at Barona Casino – for his contributions as a blackjack player and his innovations in professional gambling techniques. He was the first blackjack authority to publish the importance of deck penetration in card counting, in his 1980 book The Blackjack Formula. He was also the first blackjack researcher to argue that radical simplification of blackjack card counting systems did not substantially decrease earnings.
Thomas Hyland is an American professional blackjack player and a 2002 inductee to the Blackjack Hall of Fame. Hyland studied political science at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. Since 1979, he has been recognized for his role in forming and managing two blackjack teams. Hyland is also a card counting expert.
Max Rubin is a gambling expert and author best known for his book Comp City: A Guide to Free Gambling Vacations. The book teaches players how to maximize casino perks with little actual wagering. Rubin is also a gambling analyst for television; he served as commentator for the first two seasons of the GSN's World Series of Blackjack, along with Matt Vasgersian, and co-hosts the Ultimate Blackjack Tour with Nick GAS' Mati Moralejo on CBS. Rubin is a member of the Blackjack Hall of Fame and hosts the annual Blackjack Ball.
Anthony Curtis is a blackjack player, gambler, author and publisher. He publishes the Las Vegas Advisor, a newsletter founded in 1983 that covers discounts in Las Vegas, and Huntington Press, a publishing house that has released books about gambling, as well as true crime, including The Killing of Tupac Shakur, a Los Angeles Times bestseller by author Cathy Scott.
Donald Schlesinger is a gaming mathematician, author, lecturer, player, and member of the Blackjack Hall of Fame who specializes in the casino game of blackjack. His work in the field has spanned almost five decades. He is the author of the book Blackjack Attack - Playing the Pros' Way, currently in its third edition, which is considered one of the most sophisticated theoretical and practical studies of the game ever written. In 2023 he and Dave Brolley coauthored, The Hi-Lo Card Counting System: A Complete Guide to Index Play.
Peter A. Griffin was a mathematician, author, and blackjack expert and is one of the original seven members of the Blackjack Hall of Fame. He authored The Theory of Blackjack, considered a classic analysis of the mathematics behind the game of casino 21.
Bill Zender is an American author, business executive, consultant, and speaker.
Richard W. Munchkin is an American writer, director, producer, radio host and professional gambler.
Mike Goodman was an American professional gambler, a pit boss for a Las Vegas casino, and an author of books that gave advice on gambling and told stories of gamblers and their escapades. He is most known for his 1963 book How to Win: At Cards, Dice, Races, Roulette, which went through many printings and sold over a million copies.
Cathy "Cat" Hulbert was an American professional gambler. She was one of the world's first professional female card counters. Card Player magazine named her one of the top seven-card stud players in the world in 1996.
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is the name given by gambling authors to the four U.S. Army engineers who first discovered in the 1950s the best playing strategy in the casino game of Blackjack that can be formulated on the basis of the player's and the dealer's cards. The so-called Basic Strategy, which was subsequently refined through the use of computers and combinatorial analysis, loses the least money to the casino in the long term.
Nathaniel Tilton is an American former professional blackjack player, author of The Blackjack Life, and Certified Financial Planner.
Al Francesco is an American blackjack player and gambling strategist. Considered to be “The Godfather of Blackjack”, Francesco is recognized as the creator of the team play concept, the “big player” strategy, and the drop card method. Beginning in 1971, Francesco personally recruited and trained disciplined card counters to work together in teams to beat the casinos. Franceso's teams of blackjack players would station themselves at various blackjack tables to count the decks, and when the mathematical odds turned in their favor, the counters would signal a “Big Player” to come to the table and place large wagers until the edge was lost and once again favored the dealer. While most card counters would eventually be discovered by casinos through their betting patterns and banned from further play, Francesco's unique team concept helped his players evade detection and continue winning.
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