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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. [1] Since 1979, he has been recognized for his role in forming and managing two blackjack teams. Hyland is also a card counting expert. [1]
In a 2002 Blackjack Forum interview, Hyland reported that he started his blackjack career in 1979 after having been inspired by Lawrence Revere's book Playing Blackjack as a Business. His original blackjack team had four players who each put $4000 into the team bankroll. The team was launched when Atlantic City casinos offered blackjack with the early surrender rule, which gave knowledgeable players an edge. Within months, the Hyland team had built their bankroll to roughly $50,000.
When conditions worsened for card counters in Atlantic City, Hyland's original teammates began playing in Asia. Hyland stayed in Atlantic City and recruited golf buddies to form a new team. Hyland's blackjack team has used multiple advantage gambling techniques, including computer play, shuffle tracking, and ace sequencing. All these methods gain players a higher edge than card counting and are harder for casinos to detect.
In 1994, members of the Hyland blackjack team were arrested after an ace sequencing team play at Casino Windsor. A Blackjack Forum article documents how three Las Vegas casinos influenced authorities in Windsor to prosecute the players for cheating. [2] The case was seen by professional gamblers as an attempt to establish a legal precedent finding blackjack team play and ace sequencing strategies illegal. The judge, referring repeatedly in his written decision to expert testimony from Arnold Snyder, ruled that the players' conduct was not cheating but merely the use of intelligent strategy.
The longevity of the Hyland team is unusual among blackjack teams, which often fall apart due to discouragement or suspicion among team members during losing streaks. Many former members attribute the Hyland team's success not only to Tommy Hyland's knowledge of gambling, but to his exceptional ability to engender loyalty and trust among team members.[ citation needed ] Tommy Hyland was elected by professional gamblers as one of the 7 original inductees into the Blackjack Hall of Fame.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
The Hot Shoe is a 2004 documentary film which also reveals the history and development of card counting. Director David Layton interviewed current and former card counters, including members of the MIT Blackjack Team, casino employees and gambling authors, and combined it with behind-the-scenes footage of casino surveillance rooms and the MIT team preparing to hit the tables. Layton learned how to count cards and gambled with $5,000 of the film's budget as a "case study." The film reviews the mathematical aspects of card counting and key elements for winning blackjack.
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.
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.
Blackjack Forum was a trade journal for professional blackjack players, founded in 1981 and published by Arnold Snyder. Originally a 100-page quarterly journal, it expanded into an online forum which is frequented by professional gamblers, attorneys, industry people, mathematicians, and other aficionados. Along with Stanford Wong's Current Blackjack News, it was considered one of the major newsletters for the blackjack market.
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.
Mike Aponte, also known as MIT Mike, is a professional blackjack player and a former member of the MIT Blackjack Team. Aponte was part of a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students that legally won millions playing blackjack at casinos around the world by counting cards. He is the basis for one of the main characters, Jason Fisher, in the book, Bringing Down the House, by Ben Mezrich, which inspired the motion picture, 21.
Advantage gambling, or advantage play, refers to legal methods used to gain an advantage while gambling, in contrast to cheating. The term usually refers to house-banked casino games, but can also refer to games played against other players, such as poker. Someone who practises advantage gambling is often referred to as an advantage player, or AP. Unlike cheating, which is by definition illegal, advantage play exploits innate characteristics of a particular game to give the player an advantage relative to the house or other players. While not illegal, advantage play is often discouraged and some advantage players may be banned by certain casinos.
Shuffle tracking is an advantage gambling technique where a player tracks certain cards or sequences of cards through a series of shuffles. Shuffle tracking is typically done in blackjack games, although it can be done in other card games. Games with simple shuffles are generally easier to shuffle track than games with complicated shuffles. Thus, shuffle tracking is usually done in 6 or 8 deck shoe-dealt blackjack games, as these tend to have simpler shuffles compared to pitch games, due to the time required to accomplish a complicated shuffle on 6 or 8 decks of cards.
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.
Steven "Steve" L. Heston is an American mathematician, economist, and financier. He's also prominently active in the field of gambling-related research, where he sometimes uses the pen name Kim Lee.
Richard W. Munchkin is an American writer, director, producer, radio host and professional gambler.
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.
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.