GAMES Beating the Dealer ‘The omnicompetent computer, whose attention often ses to be concentrated fn the welfare of moon travelers and sub- mariners, may a last have produced « Dalpable’Boon for the common tun of Inankind: a system for vinning money in rambling house. ‘A. so-yearold” mathematics. professor named Edward 0. Thorp cain to bave made this important breakthrough by feeding the equivalent of 10.000° mane years of desk-calculator computations {nto an THM 709 computer and. ariving ata set of discoveries about the way the taids Huctante in the game of blackjack, or twenty-one, ‘This system enables the initiate to bet heavily when the odds are with him, Tightly when they are against im, Whats more, the cost of the system including a set of palmsized, sweat- resistant charts to take to the cisinomis nly $4.95, which happens to. be the ost of ‘Thor's book, Beat the Dealer (Biaisdet) Hard Hands & Soft. Thorp’s system is dpsed on the fact that blackjack is not what mathematicians call an “independent {ils process” in whieh, a8 in emaps. or roulette, each play is uninfluenced by the preceding plays. As each card is played in Blackjack, it changes the possiblities for both player and dealer by diminishing the number and the variety of cards that ray be dealt. rence. the’ basic blackjack strategy, according to Thorp’ computer, i tht the fewer cards valued at two to elght that ate left inthe pack, the greater advantage to the player, On the other hand a short= age of nibes, tens and. aces gives, the Aealer an advantage. A scarcity of ves, ‘Thorp’s figures indicat, is more advanta: geout to the player than 1 shortage of Say other card: when all four fives have been played, the player as an edge of 3.2090 oF a5 expressed roughly in odds, S248 in the player's favor. ‘Thorp as devised a series of charts to show vwhen to split a pair ("always split aces and tights, never split ives and tens”) * when to: double and. when to stand. Knowing when to stand and when to ask for another card is, of course, the '% Aces should alwayt te spit teense there fe 4 good chance of winning hand wth elber of the new hinds: clghts should be spt Ihe fear has a seven oF eber showing. simply Decause 16 1 sc bd total to hold spine five fs eafavorable been Ht repli ©. good {otal to det to: spliting tena throws ae ellen hand (20) for two that are only eter than vere heart of the game, ‘Thorp’s chart for this differentiates between what he calls soft” hhands—hands that contain an ace and are therefore less likely to go over 21 (aces count as either 1 or ax)—and “hard” hhands, which contain no ace. For example, when the dealer is showing a nine or ten, soft hand should draw, even on 19, because the ace in it can be taken as 7 if necessary (reducing the 19 to 9), where 1s in the same circumstances a haed hand should stand at 17. And when the dealer shows a four, five or six, a hard hand should stand at 12 (because with a four, five or six in his hand the dealer runs a considerable risk of going bust), whereas fa soft hand is advised to draw another tard up to 18. ‘This is ‘Thorp's basic strategy’; his full dress system involves a much more com- plex technique of betting in terms of the ‘number of tens, aces and fives remaining in the deck in felation to the number of ‘ards left in the pack before the next shuifle, The Small Martingale. Professional gamblers generally take Mathema ‘Thorp and his computerized charts with 2 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 $x would have to bet an illegal $512 alter only nine con- secutive losses ‘Thorp claims, however, that in Reno and Las Vegas the casino’ operators took hhim very seriously indeed after the sys- tem began to click. The dealer's most ef- fective stratagem is to. shuille 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 hhence the overall profit. TIME, JANUARY 25, 1969,