Professional Blackjack Players

Mike Aponte, also known as MIT Mike, was one of the MIT Blackjack Team’s most successful big players back in the days of Strategic Investments and subsequently on a hand-picked team of MIT blackjack players. Within years of first being recruited as a big player in 1992 he came to top casino blacklists, and it became impossible for him to count cards in casinos as a profession. Despite this, Aponte is still as involved in blackjack as ever, albeit through different channels. Read more about Mike Aponte here.

The first documented and celebrated professional Twenty-One player. That’s right, the first famous Blackjack pro was a woman. This tiny but tough-as-nails Frenchwoman roamed the American Old West making her living playing Blackjack. The nickname is misleading, because despite sporting a fuzzy moustache she was considered in her younger years to be a great beauty. Read more about Eleanor Dumont here.

In 1953, quite some time before Edward Thorp entered the scene, four men in the U.S. Army stationed at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, USA, set out to invent basic strategy for blackjack using nothing more than a set of 1950′s desk calculators and their own mathematical skills. When Thorp later used their research to devise a strategy to beat the dealer and ran their numbers through MIT computers he found that they were stunningly accurate. Read more about the Four Horsemen here.

Tommy Hyland is considered to be the most successful blackjack team leader of all time due to the longevity of his blackjack team and the millions in profits they have made in the course of the teams existence. His team has used card counting, shuffle tracking, ace sequencing and computers to beat casinos world-wide. Read more about Tommy Hyland here.

The MIT Blackjack Team has known various incarnations from 1979 onward. This team took the casinos for millions by counting cards and employing team strategies to delegate complex tasks, make optimal use of individual talents, and disguise betting patterns. They became famous due to their enormous successes. The Strategic Investments incarnation of the team was popularized in, for instance, Bringing Down the House and 21. Read more about the MIT Blackjack Team.

Today Darryl Purpose is a songwriter, musician and performer, but back in the 80s he was the fastest card counter in Atlantic City and Vegas, able to count down a deck flawlessly in under ten seconds. A successful blackjack player on his own accord, Purpose also played on various blackjack teams, including some of Ken Uston’s. He has played and won in casinos world-wide, at one point even bursting into a Yakuza meeting to demand the payout he was owed. Read more about Darryl Purpose here.

Arnold Snyder has been a professional blackjack player for over 30 years, but he is best known for his publications in the field of blackjack. He is the editor of and frequent contributor to Blackjack Forum and had authored many books on blackjack history and advantage play, including The Blackjack Formula and The Big Book of Blackjack. Read more about Arnold Snyder here.

The electronics expert Keith Taft was inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame in 2004, not for his achievements as a blackjack player, but for creating and using his ingenious inventions to effectively beat the casinos. He created numerous devices which helped him and other advantage players gain an edge over casinos, such as the portable card counting devices George and David, the shuffle tracking device Thor, and the Telly Belly. Read more about Keith Taft here.

Edward Oakley Thorp is famous for his groundbreaking research on blackjack odds and bets, and on devising card counting systems that make it possible for players to gain an advantage over the house. He is the first person to have proven that it is possible in blackjack to beat the dealer by counting cards, and his book Beat the Dealer was study material to the MIT Team. Read more about Edward Thorp.

Ken Uston was the Vice President of the Pacific Stock Exchange and President and CEO of Pacific Clearing Corporation before he met Al Francesco and became intrigued by blackjack team strategy and card counting. He was quick to master the techniques and became a Big Player, rising to fame as a flamboyant professional player and team organizer in the 70s and 80s. He wrote a number of books on blackjack, computers, and video games, took casinos that banned him to court, and was a master of camouflage and disguise. Read more about Ken Uston.

Born in 1943 as John Ferguson, Stanford Wong gained renown as a professional blackjack player in the mid-70s. He has written over a dozen books on various gambling games including blackjack, the most famous of which is his 1975 Professional Blackjack. The technique “wonging” is one of the blackjack terms named for him. Read more about Stanford Wong.