Blackjack Famous Players

Every casino game's history has its own uniquely talented people which are famous for their extraordinary faculties. Speaking about Blackjack, outstanding players of this game are members of the famous Hall of Fame.

Edward Thorp

Edward Oakley Thorp was born in August 1932. From his childhood he had a powerful mathematical mind. He was a top student during his studying, later he got a PhD. After he finished his education he worked as a lecturer at MIT. In 1961 his talent led him to gambling or, to be more precise, to blackjack card counting. Thorp learned FORTRAN, a programming language, for putting into code all his mathematical and probability computations connected with the Blackjack game. All these made Thorp the first blackjack player who employed computer programming for winning at the casino game.

Later Edward Thorp practiced and experimented on his theory by playing Blackjack in casinos of Las Vegas. During that he earned big sums of money.

During 1962 Thorp authored the book called "Beat the Dealer". Since then a lot of different events took place in the history of Blackjack such as creation of the world famous MIT Team.

Stanford Wong

The real name of this famous blackjack player is John Ferguson. Wong is not only one of the most outstanding blackjack professionals, but also a popular gambling author, owner of the publishing company called Pi Yee Press and of course the member of the Hall of Fame. He worked as a teacher in Stanford University and built his gambling career at the same time. Ferguson made popular the strategy called "wonging" according to which a player should step in the game when the deck is favorable and step out when the odds to win are deteriorate. Nowadays this strategy is banned in most casinos in Las Vegas.