Blackjack grew from Cervantes-era twenty-one
Blackjack, once black jack or vingt-un, is the world's most played casino banking game, using 52-card decks. Its English ancestor vingt-un has murky roots; Spanish veintiuno appears in Cervantes's Rinconete y Cortadillo, written about 1601–1602. Klondike gold prospectors later gave the game its modern name.
Blackjack is a casino banking game, meaning players bet against the house, and it belongs to a worldwide family of twenty-one games that also includes vingt-et-un and pontoon. The aim is to finish with a total higher than the dealer's without passing 21, or to stop early and hope the dealer busts. Number cards count at face value, jacks, queens, and kings count as 10, and an ace is worth 1 or 11, whichever helps the hand.
Its direct forerunner was the English game vingt-un. The earliest written mention of twenty-one comes from Miguel de Cervantes, himself a gambler, whose card-cheat heroes in Seville play veintiuno, and since he wrote that story in 1601 or 1602 the game was known in Castile by then. Britain recorded it in the 1770s and 1780s and printed rules in 1800, and the first American rules, in 1825, were a reprint of those. A popular tale credits the name to a bonus for the ace of spades with a black jack, but the card historian Thierry Depaulis traces it to Klondike Gold Rush prospectors of 1896 to 1899, who may have borrowed it from blackjack, a name for zinc ore found near gold.
The first optimal strategy resting on sound mathematics appeared in September 1956, when the Journal of the American Statistical Association printed "The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack" by a team of four: Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel, and James McDermott. Their work became the foundation for every later attempt to beat the game.
The dealer stands behind a semicircular table facing five to nine betting positions and shuffles together one to eight standard decks. Cards go out clockwise from the dealer's left, known as first base, with two to each hand and one face-up to the dealer, plus a face-down hole card in some games. On their first two cards players may hit, stand, double down, split, or surrender, each with its own hand signal, but after that only hitting and standing remain. Regulators such as New Jersey's specify table layouts, discard racks, and daily inspections of dealing shoes.
Source: Blackjack
