The History of Blackjack: From Twenty-One to the Casino

Blackjack is a game that changed its name more often than its rules. It began as a lowly card game for cheats and tavern players, became a fashionable pastime in 18th-century France, travelled to Britain and America under its French name, and only in the early 20th century acquired the word that every casino sign now uses. Its path into the casino is a matter of record: Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, and mathematicians soon turned their attention to the house game. Its name is a matter of dispute, and the story most often repeated about it appears to be a legend. This article follows the documented history of blackjack, from the Spanish veintiuna of 1613 to the Nevada rule changes of 1964, separating what historians can show from what players have repeated for decades.

From Thirty-One to Veintiuna

The family tree of blackjack starts long before cards were dealt in casinos. According to card historian David Parlett, twenty-one is a natural evolution of the much earlier game of Thirty-One, which seems to have been popular throughout western Europe from the middle of the 15th century, making it one of the oldest gambling card games. Playing cards themselves were still a recent import then, a story told in the history of playing cards, and the first European authorities were already trying to ban the games played with them.

The earliest literary reference to a game close to blackjack comes from Spain. In 1613 Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, published Novelas ejemplares, a collection of twelve short stories about contemporary characters. One of them, Rinconete y Cortadillo, follows two rogues, and a character in it boasts of earning his living at public houses and inns by playing veintiuna, the Spanish for twenty-one, with doctored cards that let him cut the pack so that an ace always lay at the bottom.

Parlett draws two conclusions. The first is social: the context shows that the game was low class, which would explain why no printed rules survive from before the 18th century, since the earliest books devoted to card games were written for literate readers. The second is technical. In Cervantes’s passage the ace appears to count only one point, not eleven, so that reaching twenty-one took at least three cards. Parlett speculates, without firm evidence, that the game rose in social standing in the 18th century when players began to give the ace its higher value of eleven, since that allowed twenty-one on just two cards.

Vingt-et-Un Crosses Borders

Parlett finds that vingt-et-un first appears as a socially respectable game in 18th-century France, perhaps around 1760, noting that it is absent from earlier editions of the Académie des Jeux. The historian Thierry Depaulis, writing in the Encyclopaedia Universalis, gives its first attestation in England as 1772. The first English rules were printed in the 1800 edition of Hoyle’s Games, edited by Charles Jones, according to Parlett.

Under its French name, the game then became an international pastime. Parlett writes that in both Britain and America it was played under the name vingt-un or vingt-et-un throughout the 19th century. In England the name drifted in speech, and the label Van John appears in university slang, according to the Oxford English Dictionary as quoted by Parlett. Since the First World War, the informal British game has been known as pontoon, which Parlett believes is probably a corruption of the English pronunciation of vingt-et-un.

In America, the French name gave way. Parlett writes that vingt-et-un was replaced by blackjack early in the 20th century, and Depaulis dates the appearance of the term blackjack in the United States to that same early part of the century. A 2010 article by Depaulis in The Playing-Card, the journal of the International Playing-Card Society, links the name to the Klondike gold rush, a claim covered in the section on myths below.

Three Turning Points

The first turning point was legal. Nevada legalized gambling houses in 1931, and Depaulis credits that decision with bringing blackjack into the casinos. A game that had been played in private rooms and informal banks could now be dealt openly, by a house employee with fixed rules.

The second was mathematical. In September 1956, four researchers at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott, published The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, volume 51, pages 429 to 439. They analyzed the house game as played in the casinos of Las Vegas, in which the dealer’s strategy is completely fixed by known house rules, and concluded that the optimum strategy they derived differs substantially from the published strategies of card experts and the usual style of play in the casinos.

The third was Edward O. Thorp’s book Beat the Dealer, published in November 1962 according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which caused a sensation among players and heightened concern among gaming regulators. The book and its author are the subject of a profile on WagerPast. The casinos’ response, which came less than two years later, is a short episode with a lesson of its own.

The Casinos Answer in 1964

Until the early 1960s, single-deck blackjack was the standard in Nevada, according to a University of California, Irvine exhibit on Thorp’s papers. Casinos theorized that dealing from shoes of four or six decks would thwart card counters, because multiple decks made it harder to keep an accurate count. Thorp himself later wrote that for players using the High-Low system the extra decks were not much harder to handle.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that in early 1964 casino owners and operators met to discuss strategies to counter the book, and that the meeting led to multiple-deck blackjack and the elimination of many betting options. On April 1, 1964, the Nevada Resort Hotel Association announced new blackjack rules, according to the Irvine exhibit: splitting pairs and doubling down would be restricted, and the cards would be reshuffled after only a couple of deals. These changes significantly increased the house advantage.

They were also unpopular. The Irvine exhibit states that both card counters and players who did not count stopped playing, and the casinos had no choice but to reinstate the original rules. Journalist Liz Benston, writing in 2008, likewise reported that the casinos restored the old rules just as quickly when blackjack customers stopped playing. The episode shows how closely the house watched its own mathematics, and how a rule change that tilts the game too far can empty a casino floor.

The Name Myth and Other Disputes

The best-known story about blackjack is that early gambling houses, hoping to attract players, paid a bonus of ten to one when a two-card twenty-one consisted of the ace of spades and a black jack, and that the name stuck after the bonus was withdrawn. Parlett calls the explanation plausible and often repeated, but states that no one has yet offered any documentary evidence for it. The only supporting claim he mentions is from the gambling writer John Scarne, who said that as early as 1919 felt table layouts from a Chicago equipment distributor carried the inscription that blackjack pays odds of three to two. Parlett notes that Scarne acknowledged only hearsay for that assertion.

The alternative comes from Depaulis, whose 2010 article is titled Dawson’s Game: Blackjack and the Klondike. Its subject is where and when the game took its name, and its title ties the answer to the Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s rather than to a casino promotion. Depaulis’s Encyclopaedia Universalis entry adds a note of caution: the use of the word blackjack, originally a term for a black jack card, in a game where black jacks play no special role remains unexplained.

Other points stay open. Parlett dates the French game to about 1760 while Depaulis’s English record begins in 1772, and Cervantes’s 1613 story shows that a game very like it existed in Spain at least a century earlier. The other side of the story is the company the game kept: the characters in Cervantes’s story are card cheats, and the game’s early reputation was low class. Nothing in the record suggests that its modern respectability was inevitable.

Blackjack Timeline

Related Stories

For the deck that every twenty-one game depends on, read the history of playing cards. Another table game with a disputed origin is told in the history of roulette, which follows the wheel from Paris salons to Monte Carlo. For the legal fight that followed the card-counting era, see the profile of Ken Uston, whose case reached the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1982.

Sources & References

• David Parlett — Blackjack (history of the game)
• Thierry Depaulis — Blackjack, Encyclopædia Universalis
• Thierry Depaulis — Dawson’s Game: Blackjack and the Klondike, The Playing-Card, vol. 38, no. 4 (April–June 2010), pp. 238–244
• Roger R. Baldwin, Wilbert E. Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James P. McDermott — The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack, Journal of the American Statistical Association 51 (September 1956)
• University of California, Irvine Libraries — Edward O. Thorp exhibit: Beat the House
• Liz Benston, Casino City Times — Must be ’21’ to entertain this idea (2008)
• Eli Segall, Las Vegas Review-Journal — Counting a legend (2008)