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Gambling with playing cards is thought to have started sometime around 1440 in Germany after Johann Gutenberg printed the first deck. Although it is obscure, Blackjack is said to have been derived from many of the first card games created at this time.

Baccarat, appeared around 1490 in Italy and was followed by the game of seven and a half. It appears with seven and a half the player automatically lost if he went above the desired number.

Around 1570 or so in Spain a game called one and thirty was first played. In addition, the duke of Wellington, the marques of Queensbury, and the Prime Minister Disraeli were thought to have played a game called quince (fifteen) which was popular from 1827 to 1844.

Although it is disputed most probably the game of blackjack has originated from French casinos in around 1700 where it was called "vingt-et-un" ("twenty-and-one"). The origin of this game in US can be traced since 1800. The name Blackjack is given to this game because if the player got a Jack of Spades and an Ace of Spades as the first two cards (Spade being the color black of course), the player was additionally remunerated.

Gambling and casino was made illegal in west from 1850 to 1910. In this period Nevada made it a crime to operate a gambling game, but in early 1931, through a re-legalization, Nevada allowed casino gambling. Now Blackjack became one of the primary games of chance offered to gamblers. In 1978 casino gambling was made legal in Atlantic City of New Jersey.

The first recognized effort to apply mathematics to BlackJack began in 1953 and culminated in 1956 with a published paper. Roger Baldwin wrote a paper in the Journal of the American Statistical Association titled "The Optimum Strategy in BlackJack". These pioneers used calculators and probability and statistics theory to substantially reduce the house advantage. Although the title of their paper was 'optimum strategy', it wasn't really the best strategy because they really needed a computer to refine their system.

Professor Edward O. Thorp picked up where Baldwin and company left off. In 1962, Thorp refined their basic strategy and developed the first card counting techniques. He published his results in "Beat the Dealer" , a book that became so popular that for a week in 1963 it was on the New York Times best seller list. The book also scared the hell out of the casinos.

The casinos were so affected by "Beat the Dealer" that they began to change the rules of the game to make if more difficult for the players to win. This didn't last long as people protested by not playing the new pseudo-Blackjack. The unfavorable rules resulted in a loss of income for the casinos. Of course, not making money is a sin for a casino, so they quickly reverted back to the original rules. As Thorp's "Ten-Count" method wasn't easy to master and many people didn't really understand it anyway, the casinos made a bundle from the game's newly gained popularity thanks to Thorp's book and all the media attention it generated. Blackjack became the number one table game in the 1960's, '70's and '80's.

Another major contributor in the history of winning Blackjack play is Julian Braun, who worked at IBM. His thousands of lines of computer code and hours of Blackjack simulation on IBM mainframes resulted in "The Basic Strategy", and a number of card counting techniques. His conclusions were used in a 2nd edition of "Beat the Dealer" , and later in Lawrence Revere's 1977 book "Playing Blackjack as a Business" .

Ken Uston used five computers that were built into the shoes of members of his playing team in 1977. They won over a hundred thousand dollars in a very short time but one of the computers was confiscated and sent to the FBI. The agents decided that the computer used public information on BlackJack playing and was not a cheating device. You may have seen this story in a movie made about his BlackJack exploits detailed in his book "The Big Player". Ken was also featured on a 1981 Sixty Minutes show and helped lead a successful legal challenge to prevent Atlantic City casinos from barring card counters.