Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is the name given by gambling authors to the four U.S. Army engineers who first discovered in the 1950s the best playing strategy in the casino game of Blackjack that can be formulated on the basis of the player's and the dealer's cards. The so-called Basic Strategy, which was subsequently refined through the use of computers and combinatorial analysis, loses the least money to the casino in the long term. History In 1953, Roger Baldwin, a private in the U.S. Army with a master's degree in mathematics from Columbia University, stationed in Aberdeen Proving Ground, the U.S. Army's oldest active proving ground, was playing dealer's choice poker in the barracks. After a player acting as dealer selected Blackjack, someone remarked that the dealer, as they do in the Las Vegas casinos, would have to stand on 17 and hit on 16. Baldwin was intrigued by this news enough to embark on a project during his off-work hours to discover the optimal playing strategy for the player on the basis of the player's and the dealer's cards, as well as the rules dictating the dealer's play. For this, Baldwin asked the help of Wilbert Cantey, a sergeant at the facility, who had left the seminary because of his hustling at pool and cards and pursued a master's degree in Mathematics. They enlisted the help of privates Herbert Maisel, who later became a professor at Georgetown University, and James McDermott, who had a master's from Columbia University. For their project, the four Army men used only the desk calculators available at the military base, which were called at the time “adding machines.” The result of their work was presented in an analytical study in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, in September 1956, and subsequently in a book titled Playing Blackjack to Win that was published in 1957. The book, with a foreword written by TV quiz-show star Charles Van Doren, contained a pull-out strategy chart with sections on Draw or Stand, Doubling Down, and Splitting Pairs. The book did include, in a chapter titled "Using the Exposed Cards to Improve Your Chances", the first valid card-counting system ever published, but their method was not strong enough to offer a positive-expectation strategy for the player, although it did offer the least costly strategy in the game of casino Blackjack.