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Blackjack Books
I have filtered through the almost 200 books
on Card Counting at Amazon.com and presented the best of them here.
The first listing is my own PDF e-booklet which makes for a good
introduction. For further reading, you can't beat Scoblete's Best
Blackjack. The remaining three are classics that provide more of a
historical perspective.
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Free booklet
This is our e-booklet on card counting.
It includes a step-by-step guide to learning card counting using the
hi-lo method, as well as chapters on betting strategy and how to avoid
getting caught. You can get this booklet emailed to you free
simply by visiting our online casino page, clicking on one of the
links to an online casino and sending me an
email stating the audited payouts for one of
the featured casinos. |
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Best Blackjack
There seems to be general consensus
throughout the card counting community that this is the best modern
book on blackjack. It has excellent information on various counting
systems and it shows quite clearly that the simplest systems are often
the best systems because the difference in expectation between complex
and simple is marginal. Scoblete shines in
his ability to put theory into context and show how his ideas and
methods actually work in a casino. This is one of a half dozen books
written about blackjack that are really quality literature as opposed
to get rich quick nonsense. It is evident from the massive amount of
research that Scoblete has done and the hundreds of sources he relates
that the man has done his homework. If you want to be a winner or have
a good shot at winning, this is a very valuable book. It is also a
very enjoyable read as Scoblete is a fine writer who knows how to use
anecdotes toget his points across. He deserves his best selling status
for sure. |
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Professional Blackjack
Professional Blackjack by Stanford Wong is
a classic book on card counting. It was originally written and
published in the late 1970's, and is little changed in the current
edition. As many reviewers have noted over the years, Wong's writing
style is brittle and lacks punch, but the information is solid (though
a little dated) and this book contains most of what you need to become
a winning Blackjack player.
The 1994 edition of Professional Blackjack contains 100 tables, not
counting the tables in the appendixes. The tables give strategy index
numbers for a variety of rules. The book also contains results of
simulations for various sets of rules, so you can learn how valuable
one rule is compared to another; for example, you can turn to page 185
and learn that to a card counter, double after split is about the same
value as late surrender. |
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Million Dollar
Blackjack
Ken Uston (God rest
his soul) was the KING of 21 during the 1970s and early 1980s. Million
Dollar Blackjack is a masterpiece of the game, and the scene around it
in Las Vegas and A-City during that time. Many casinos have knocked
out single- and double-deck games, moving to 6 and 8 deck shoes. Uston
did not have to deal with that back in the day; yet his stories about
fighting off Griffin agents, pit bosses, and squirrly female dealers
are the stuff of legends. The stories in this book pay for the price
itself. As for the blackjack knowledge, the card counting pages are
excellent, and while the comps information is 20 years too late, it
still makes for interesting reading. |
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Beat the Dealer
Another classic, although many players
consider this book to be no longer relevant. It is the
definitive guide to Blackjack's "Basic Strategy" plus provides a
fascinating historical perspective on how Thorp ran the computer
simulations to develop the Basic Strategy and test it in Nevada
casinos back in the early '60's. The methods Thorp used (card counting) to make a lot of money
back in the '60's no longer work today, but that doesn't diminish the
value of the book. The casinos were changing the rules and "shutting
down" the big opportunities before Thorp even finished the book. But
that isn't the measure of the value of the book (although it is
testimony to how powerful Thorps's insights were when first
developed). |
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