Blackjack is believed to have originated in French casinos in the early 18th century where it was called "vingt-et-un" (Twenty One) and migrated to the U.S. in the 1800's. It initially wasn't as popular as poker in gambling houses, so as a promotion for the game they started offering a 10 to 1 payout to any player who received an ace of spades and a jack of spades on their first two cards. And thus term "black jack" as both the highest hand possible and the name of the game was born.

Gambling was legal in the western States from the 1850's to 1910, at which time Nevada criminalized operating a gambling game. In 1931, Nevada re-legalized casino gambling, and blackjack became one of the most popular games available to gamblers.

The first known effort to apply mathematics to blackjack occurred in 1956 with a paper by Roger Baldwin, published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. The dry, ten pages long "The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack" showed ways to substantially reduce the house advantage using calculators, probability, and statistics theory. The article was the first to prove that if a player were to follow the same strategy as the dealer (always standing on 17 or higher and never doubling down or splitting pairs) it gives the dealer a 5.6% advantage.

In 1962 MIT Professor Edward O. Thorp continued Baldwin's work by using the study to develop a computer program which could analyze how strategy should be altered based upon cards remaining in the deck. His book "Beat the Dealer" provided the first card counting technique and was so popular it appeared the New York Times bestseller list for a week. The irrefutable mathematical method to win money from the house worried casinos so much that they began to change the rules of the game to make it more difficult for the players to win. But as soon as gamblers began turning away from casinos in droves because of the new rules, they reverted to the old ones. Many players found Thorp's method too difficult to understand anyway, so the casinos wound up increasing their business from the publicity that his study generated.

IBM employee Julian Braun provided the next major step in the evolution of blackjack strategy. He used thousands of lines of computer code on the hyper advanced mainframes at his company to develop several card counting techniques. His developments were used in a second edition of Beat the Dealer, and then separately in the 1977 book "Playing Blackjack as a Business".

In 1977 a gambler named Ken Uston used a playing team and computers to win over a hundred thousand dollars from a casino. The casino promptly reacted by discovering and confiscating one of the computers. But the government ruled that the computer held only public information on blackjack, and therefore it wasn't cheating. Ken later helped keep the practice of card counting permissible through a successful legal challenge to Atlantic City casinos.

MIT again played a role in beating the house at blackjack in the 90's when students Semyon Dukach, Katie Lilienkamp and Andy Bloch decided to use teams armed with advanced card counting techniques to make quick money from casinos all over the world. Members of the team would watch tables to wait for the optimum time to join in a game, at which time they would signal another player to place an exceptionally large bet. They continued to successfully make money with these methods until a private investigator agency hired by casinos identified the students after months of surveillance. From that point on, security quickly ejected members of the counting team as soon as they were spotted in a casino.

Today, Blackjack remains one of the most popular casino card games for its easy to understand rules and low house edge. Casinos work to increase the edge by having multiple deck games, not allowing players to join a game until the deck is freshly shuffled, and using sophisticated methods to recognize card counting. However, even these measures are unlikely to discourage counters, as the promise easy money continues to fuel the ever evolving realm of blackjack strategy.