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. The game is a comparing card game where players compete against the dealer, rather than each other.
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. The students were from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and other leading colleges; they 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 around the world have been formed with the goal of beating the casinos.
John Scarne was an American magician and author who was particularly adept at playing card manipulation. He became known as an expert on cards and other games, and authored a number of popular books on cards, gambling, and related topics.
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.
Breaking Vegas is a television series that premiered on The History Channel in the United States in 2004. The series covers the great lengths people have gone to make money, sometimes illegally, from casinos.
Peter Dickson is a Northern Irish voice-over artist. He is best known as the brand voice of The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent and also as the voice of television channel E4. His other work includes Ireland's Got Talent, The Price Is Right, Family Fortunes and All Star Mr & Mrs.
Bobby "The Wizard" Hoff was an American professional poker player, based in Long Beach, California. According to Hoff, his nickname "The Wizard" refers to his ability to make mountains of chips disappear.
Jonathan Kenneth Butler is a South African singer-songwriter and guitarist. His music is often classified as R&B, jazz fusion or worship music.
Robert Jayne, also known as Bobby Jacoby, is an American actor, real estate developer and professional blackjack player.
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.
Herbert Holden Thorp is an American chemist, professor and entrepreneur. He is a professor of chemistry at George Washington University. He was the tenth chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, assuming the position on July 1, 2008, succeeding James Moeser, and, at age 43, was noted as being among the youngest leaders of a university in the United States. At the time of his selection as chancellor, Thorp was the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a Kenan Professor of chemistry at the university. Thorp is a 1986 graduate of UNC; he later earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from California Institute of Technology, and was a postdoctoral associate at Yale University.
21 is a 2008 American heist drama film directed by Robert Luketic and distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing. The film is inspired by the story of the MIT Blackjack Team as told in Bringing Down the House, the best-selling 2003 book by Ben Mezrich. IMDb offers a brief summary of the film: "21 is about six MIT students who become trained to be experts in card counting in Black Jack and subsequently took Las Vegas casinos for millions in winnings." The film stars Jim Sturgess, Kevin Spacey, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Bosworth, Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts, Aaron Yoo, and Kieu Chinh. 21 was a box office success and was the number one film in the United States and Canada during its first and second weekends of release, despite some mixed reviews.
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.
Busting Vegas is a 2005 book by Ben Mezrich about a group of MIT card counters and blackjack players commonly known as the MIT Blackjack Team. The subtitle of the original, hardcover edition was The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees, but the subtitle of the subsequent paperback editions was A True Story of Monumental Excess, Sex, Love, Violence, and Beating the Odds.
Professor Splash is the show name of Darren Taylor. Taylor is an American show diver from Denver, Colorado. He is well known for breaking high diving records using small pools. He holds the Guinness World Records for highest shallow water dive. Taylor has been on The History Channel's Stan Lee's Superhumans and explained the form of his famous dive. Taylor appeared on Discovery Channel's Time Warp and set a world record dive captured on slow motion cameras.
Bored to Death is an American comedy series that ran on HBO from September 20, 2009, to November 28, 2011. The show was created by author Jonathan Ames, and stars Jason Schwartzman as a fictional Jonathan Ames—a writer based in Brooklyn, New York City, who moonlights as an unlicensed private detective. The show also stars Ted Danson as George and Zach Galifianakis as Ray, both friends of Jonathan. On December 20, 2011, HBO cancelled Bored to Death after three seasons and twenty-four episodes.
Boardwalk Empire is an American period crime drama television series created by Terence Winter for the premium cable channel HBO. The series is set chiefly in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the Prohibition era of the 1920s and stars Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson. Winter, a Primetime Emmy Award-winning screenwriter and producer, created the show, inspired by Nelson Johnson's 2002 non-fiction book Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City, about the historical criminal kingpin Enoch L. Johnson.
Groove High is a musical-comedy television series which aired on Disney Channel from November 2012 to March 2013. A mixture of live action and animation, the series centers around touring rock pop stars Tom played by Jonathan Bailey and Zoe played by Samantha Barks as they reminisce their time at their performing arts high school Groove High.
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.
