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 It is not absolutely clear how the game of Blackjack was invented, many nations (French, Italian, Spanish) claim that it was derived from some of their own nationally popular card games. The only sure thing about the origin of Blackjack is that it was definitely not created by any single person at any given time in the past, but was rather influenced by various card games in the course of its history.
The French are now given the most credit for the invention of Blackjack, the most widespread belief being that it originated from the French card games “Chemin de fer” (“Railway” in translation) and “French Ferme” (“French Farm”). Another card game considered to be a direct predecessor of Blackjack was “Vingt-et-un” (“Twenty-One”), which used to be played in French casinos during the 1700s. Twenty-One does bear some resemblance to Blackjack in the way that the goal was to reach a hand value of 21 points, but it was also different in the way that the cards were dealt in rounds and betting used to take place after each round.
There are other card games that have similar rules to those of Blackjack and that might have influenced it. One such game was the Italian “Seven and a Half”, known to be the first card game with the rule of busting (losing the hand automatically) in case of going over the seven and a half hand value. Another was the Spanish “One and Thirty”, this one differing from Blackjack in the way that it used to be played with three cards and that the goal was to reach 31 points.
Back to the history of Blackjack, the game “Vingt-et-un” was brought to the United States most probably by French colonists sometime in the 1800s and began to gradually spread over United States casino halls. The first time recorded when it was offered in a casino was in Evansville, Indiana, in 1910.
Initially Twenty-One was not very popular and that was why various bonuses were offered to the players to entice them. One such bonus is famed to have given Blackjack its current name – collecting the Jack of Spades (or either of the black Jacks – of Spades or of Clubs – in some casinos) and the Ace of Spades in the first two cards would give the player a bonus payout of ten to one. That was how the name “Blackjack” actually came into being.
The popularity of Blackjack continued to rise even as or perhaps because gambling was banned in the beginning of the 19th century in all of the United States until it was finally legalised firstly in Nevada in 1931, other states following.
The game gained a lot of popularity also strangely thanks to several scientists, mathematicians and statisticians mainly, who made use of science to make money from playing Blackjack and even published books on Blackjack strategy. One such very successful book was Professor Edward O. Thorp’s (often referred to as the Einstein of Blackjack) “Beat the Dealer”, published in 1963, which became so popular for a week that even made it into the New York Times’ bestseller list.
Stanford Wong’s “Professional Blackjack” was a similar book, there was a second edition of the “Beat the Dealer”, Lawrence Revere’s “Playing Black Jack as a Business” and even the novel-like Ken Uston’s “The Big Player”.
Another milestone contributing to or perhaps already rather a reflection of Blackjack’s immense popularity was the Academy Award winning movie “The Rain Man” featuring Hollywood stars Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman.
Presently, thanks to the rapid development of information and communication technologies, Blackjack has successfully entered the worldwide web, its many online versions making it easily accessible to the rising number of Internet users. |
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