One of the best ways of foreseeing the future is to understand the human nature. Our needs, hopes, problems and dreams are often the basis for our future making. The nature of the human being is one of the most important ingredients in a complicated gambling business. Each of the parties - a casino and a gambler, long to win money from each other. And the growing strain will determine the future of the game.

Blackjack before 1962: Before publication of the classic book “Beat The Dealer” by Edward O. Thorp in 1962 no single player had ever suspected of such a thing as the Basic Strategy. Everyone used one's own mixture of superstitions concerning the way in which one or the other hand had to play. Plus, some experience gained while playing at home in the kitchen. Excluding a small number of professional card-players who intuitively presupposed that their overbalance would be more if there were more bowers left in a pack, practically none won in blackjack. Naturally, casinos felt quite comfortable under such conditions. Till 1962 blackjack was not very popular, though percentagewise the profit rate was exclusively high.

The next decade: from 1962 till 1972: After publication of the book by Thorp the situation changed radically. When the book mounted the peak of sales, became a bestseller, and the professor Thorp became an internationally famous personality, casinos were terrified that thus everyone could learn the system of Thorp and would start beating casinos winning huge amounts of money.

The results of this panic are well-known. The majority of casinos cardinally changed the blackjack rules creating even a larger overbalance in comparison with the previous set of rules. These introductions were effective a few weeks only as the majority of casinos’ clients simply refused to play a game with such bad rules. Subordinating to the law of supply and demand casinos had to quickly restore traditional rules for all. After this gamblers started immediately to play again, more than that in considerably larger quantities.

The popularity of Thorp’s book played into the hands of casinos. Blackjack started to attract crowds of people who thought they could “beat a dealer” only after they had read one book.

But the fact remained that casinos’ visitors continued to lose the same amounts of money while playing blackjack as before. Only the number of gamblers increased a hundred times. The majority of those who had read the book simply didn’t understand the way the calculation of tens given in the book worked, and those who got to the bottom didn’t take enough pains so as to master the system of calculation from A to Z. Casinos observed in surprise the incredibly increased profits.

Reedition of the book in 1966 gave a reader a simpler calculation system. Over that period of time a number of books on blackjack were published. The game gathered pace. Casinos were setting more and more tables. Blackjack was becoming the most popular game in casinos having outrun the previous leader craps.

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