Blackjack

The history of Blackjack card games itself is still disputed but was probably spawned from other French games such as "chemin de fer" and "French Ferme". Blackjack derives from a family of card games that includes Baccarat, Seven-And-A-Half and Vingt-Et-Un (known to Americans as 21 and to Australians as Pontoon). Certainly some of these card games will be known to you but do you know what they all have in common? They're all card games that claim or are credited to be the origin of today's Blackjack. Standardized decks of cards for blackjack tables first appeared in 1440 when Johann Guttenberg printed the 50-card deck. Within a few years his cards and the card games played with them were hugely popular among the rich and the royal.

Many of those card games involved reaching a certain card-count total. In one of the oldest Blackjack ancestors Baccarat, which appeared in Italy in the 1490's, the total was of course 9. Another Italian contender to Blackjack's ancestry was Seven-and-a-half, which was played with only Eights, Nines, Tens and face cards, which counted as the Half. The King of Diamonds was wild. This was the first of card games where the player would automatically "bust" if the cards totaled over the desired number of 7-1/2.

One of the old Spanish cards One-and-Thirty is dated 1570. In this card game each player antes in and is dealt three cards followed by three community cards dealt to center table. Each player takes one community card and replaces it with a discard from their hand. The process continues until each player is "content" at which point the totals are taken. By the early 1800's the French card games Quinze and Trente-et-Quarante (aka Rouge-et-Noir) had become quite popular. In Quinze the desired total was 15 and in Trente-et-Quarante was and is still played with 6 decks of cards, with a croupier dealing out a row of black cards and a row of red cards sequentially after card games players have bet on either row. A variety of in-row bets are possible bringing Trente-et-Quarante closer to Roulette in its play than Black Jack.

In fact of all card games that were ancestors of Blackjack it was Vingt-Un that finally crossed the ocean from Europe to America in the late 1800's were Blackjack originated. When the game was first introduced in America it was the least popular of card games so the gambling houses tried various bonus payouts to get the future Blackjack fans to the tables. On such bonus was a 10-to-1 payout if the player's hand consisted of the Ace of Spades and a Blackjack (either the Jack of Clubs of the Jack of Spades). This hand was called a "Blackjack" for obvious reasons and the name stuck even though the bonus payout was soon abolished. So, by 1919 special green-felted Blackjack tables were being made and by 1931 Blackjack was the third most popular of all Nevada casino card games after Roulette and Craps. In 1958 the first numerically proven Blackjack basic strategies appeared and Blackjack was well on its way to being number one of card games.

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