Word: thorp
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...DETECTIVE by Roderick Thorp. 598 pages. Dial...
Knowing when to stand and when to ask for another card is, of course, the heart of the game. Thorp's chart for this differentiates between what he calls "soft" hands-hands that contain an ace and are therefore less likely to go over 21 (aces count as either 1 or 11)-and "hard" hands, which contain no ace. For example, when the dealer is showing a nine or ten, a soft hand should draw, even on 19, because the ace in it can be taken as 1 if necessary (reducing the 19 to 9), whereas in the same...
...This is Thorp's basic strategy; his full-dress system involves a much more complex technique of betting in terms of the number of tens, aces and fives remaining in the deck in relation to the number of cards left in the pack before the next shuffle...
...Small Martingale. Professional gamblers generally take Mathematician Thorp and his computerized charts with a sneer and a leer; system players, they say, are always ultimate losers because they play on and on, giving the house odds a chance to operate. The only successful system, known as the Small Martingale, is to double the bet after each losing play, a maneuver the casinos effectively counter by establishing a bet limit. With a limit of $500, a doubler starting at $1 would have to bet an illegal $512 after only nine consecutive losses...
...Thorp claims, however, that in Reno and Las Vegas the casino operators took him very seriously indeed after the system began to click. The dealer's most effective stratagem is to shuffle between each hand. This destroys Thorp's carefully arrived at calculations, but the operators use it only as a last resort because it slows down the play at the table and hence the overall profit...