The card counting father
Edward O. Thorp is the American math professor and one of the most famous blackjack players in the Blackjack history. He is considered to be the card-counting technique creator. Thorp has easily proved that card counting can be successfully used to beat casino house edge in blackjack game. He even wrote a book in 1962 about this, called Beat the Dealer.
However, his book had unexpected effect on players, as it brought worldwide attention of the public. Thousands of players started playing blackjack in casinos and were trying to use the card counting technique on practice.
Blackjack studies
Born in 1933, Edward O. Thorp got his Masters in physics & doctorate in math from UCLA. Soon afterwards he became the mathematical professor at UCLA, MIT, NMSU &UC Irvine.
During his work at MIT Edward O. Thorp started exploring the possibility of creating the mathematical models for winning at the blackjack game.
Thorp's ideas
Edward O. Thorp made simple observations at every casino game. He noticed that the events in the past have no influence on the future outcomes. For example, the roulette spin in no way affects the next roulette spin, or the last roll of dice influence the future event. However, the odds of the games stay the same. Thorp considered the reason of that and came to the conclusion that it can be explained by the blackjack process. The cards being used are put aside and cannot be used by other hand. That is why the probabilities of winning are not based on the complete deck of 52 cards but on the remaining cards in the deck to be dealt.
Although, it may seem that the basic blackjack system is simple, but in reality it would be hard to make use of it on practice if Thorp hadn't spent many hours at the computer, learning Fortran, and developing his blackjack system.
Thorp's system
Thorp developed the system based on counting dealt cards alongside with analyzing the dealer's up cards & player's own cards and making fast and accurate mental odds calculations before making the moves whether to stand, hit, split or double down.
The main idea of the system is not to win at each hand, but make higher bets when odds are preferable for a player and bet less if odds are better for a dealer. This can help players to be successful in the long run game.