History of combinatorial math

Gambling games have always had their share of individuals who spend gobs of time finding ways to turn a chance game into one of skill. Though completely fair, often these practices are at odds with the interests of casinos.

Sometime in the 1960s a few savvy math geniuses and statisticians began applying combinatorial mathematics to decks of cards. They wanted to know how many times a deck would have to be shuffled to consistently create a random array of cards. The information they culled, of interest to gamblers, was the fact that a casino’s card decks were never shuffled to the point of randomness, not even close.

Out of these mathematical findings, various strategies were developed that led to the skills of card counting and shuffle tracking. Card counters are able to track the high and low cards during a game, both those that have already been dealt and those that have yet to be dealt. With that information, expert advantage players know almost exactly when and where high and low cards will occur and how to use this knowledge to their betting advantage. These skills take serious mental dexterity, combined with a keen attention to detail.

Tommy Hyland became an expert Blackjack player during the 1970s by using the methods of card counting and shuffle tracking combined with betting expertise. In the late 70s he assembled a group of expert Blackjack players so skilled in what were being termed “advantage skills” that they were summarily able to win millions over the next decade by applying their skills, in teams, to casino Blackjack games. Hyland’s team became so renowned that they are simply known as the Hyland Team.

Again in the 1990s, a group of math whizzes from MIT spent their off-study hours training themselves at expert advantage skills, like card counting and shuffle tracking. The millions they won en masse at American casinos have made them famous throughout the Blackjack world. Angry casinos spent great deals of time trying to evade them and restrict them. And in the meantime, mainstream media ate up the story.

The controversy over the practice of card counting and shuffle tracking is that casinos claim to offer games of chance, not games of skill. Games of skill can be won, they can be learned. The Hyland Team and the MIT Team learned skills that allowed them to consistently beat a game that the casinos intended to be unbeatable, at least with any regularity. And court cases have ensued over the issue.