Max is the author of Comp City, first published in 1994, with an expanded second edition published in 2002. In this groundbreaking book, Max exposed techniques even non-counting players could use to get an advantage over the casinos using weaknesses in the casinos’ comp systems. This information came from his years of experience in the industry as a dealer, pit boss, and casino manager. Max still does consulting work for the Barona Casino in California.
The initial manuscript for Comp City included advanced comp-hustling techniques that could be used by professional card counters, but the editors at Huntington Press prefered to remove this section from the book in order to appeal to the wider market of recreational players. These excluded portions were published later in Blackjack Forum in June 1994, and you can easily find it online.
At that time, he started hosting the Blackjack Ball, a secret annual event for professional players, where he serves as Game Master as many of the top pros compete for the Blackjack Cup and the title of World’s Best Blackjack Player.
Now, as a host of the Game Show Network’s World Series of Blackjack, Rubin has become one of the most visible public advocates of professional players.
Liebhen | 4.08.2009 13:02 | No Comments
Edward Oakley Thorp is widely regarded, by professional players as well as the general public, as the Father of Card Counting. It was in his book, Beat the Dealer, first published in 1962, that he presented his Ten-Count system, the first powerful winning blackjack system ever made available to the public. There isn’t any card-counting system that is in use today and is not variation of Thorp’s Ten-Count.
When Thorp’s book became US best seller, its popularity was so big that the Las Vegas casinos attempted to change the standard rules of blackjack, but players would not accept these changes and refused to play the new version of the game. So, the Vegas casinos went back to the old rules, but switched from dealing hand-held one-deck games to four-deck shoe games, a change that the players would accept. But this was useless: in 1966 Thorp’s revised second edition of Beat the Dealer was published. This edition presented the High-Low Count, as developed by Julian Braun, a more powerful and practical counting system for attacking these new shoe games.
In 1961, Thorp and C. Shannon jointly invented the first wearable computer, a device that successfully predicted results in roulette. Thorp has an M.A. in Physics and a Ph.D. in mathematics, and has taught mathematics at UCLA, MIT, NMSU, and U.C. Irvine, where he also taught quantitative finance. For many years Ed Thorp wrote a column for the now-defunct Gambling Times magazine. Many of these columns were collected in a book titled The Mathematics of Gambling, published in 1984 by Lyle Stuart.
Liebhen | 4.08.2009 13:02 | No Comments
