Blackjack! The face cards (Jack, Queen, and King) count as 10 points, and the Ace counts as 1 or 11.

Blackjack, also known as twenty-one and pontoon in British English , is one of the most popular casino card games in the world. Its precursor was "vingt-et-un" which originated in French casinos around 1700, and which did not offer the 3:2 bonus for a two-card 21. When the game was first introduced in the United States, it wasn't very popular so gambling houses tried various bonus payouts to get the players to the tables. One such bonus was a 10-to-1 payout if the player's hand consisted of the Ace of Spades and a black Jack (either the Jack of Clubs of the Jack of Spades). This was called a "blackjack" for obvious reasons and the name stuck even though the bonus payout was soon abolished. Much of blackjack's popularity is due to the mix of chance with elements of skill and decision making, and the publicity that surrounds the practice of card counting, a skill with which players can turn the odds of the game in their favor by making betting decisions based on the values of the cards known to remain in the deck.

Other casino games with opportunities

Casino games in which a player can get an advantage with sufficiently skilled play and game selection include poker tables, video poker machines, and a few video slot machines. For other games, such as roulette and craps, it can be mathematically proven that no advantageous betting strategies exist (however, experts have claimed that both games are beatable - roulette through the use of "bias tracking" and craps through dice influencing or dice control).

References

• Beat the Dealer : A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One, Edward O. Thorp, 1966, ISBN 0394703103
• Playing Blackjack as a Business, Lawrence Revere, 1971
• The World's Greatest Blackjack Book, Lance Humble and Carl Cooper, 1980
• Million Dollar Blackjack, Ken Uston, 1981
• Ken Uston on Blackjack, Ken Uston, 1986, ISBN 0818404116

Professional Blackjack, Stanford Wong, 1994 (1975), ISBN 0935926216

• Blackbelt in Blackjack, Arnold Snyder, 1998 (1980), ISBN 0910575053
• Knock-Out Blackjack, Olaf Vancura and Ken Fuchs, 1998, ISBN 0929712315

Mathematics of blackjack

• Luck, Logic, and White Lies: The Mathematics of Games, Joerg Bewersdorff, 2004, ISBN 1568812108, 121-134
• The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, Richard A. Epstein, 1977, ISBN 012240761X, 215-251
• The Theory of Blackjack, Peter Griffin, 1996 (1979), ISBN 0929712129

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