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Ken Uston: an Honored Member of The Blackjack Hall of Fame
Though all the original and subsequent members of the Blackjack Hall of Fame are deserving of the honor, many people consider Ken Uston to be the greatest blackjack player of all time. He is certainly one of the most famous and his name will always live on in blackjack history. Ken Uston was the leading blackjack player of the 1970s and ‘80s. He mastered and perfected the concepts of card counting and blackjack team play. He was an engaging personality and a mathematical genius who won important legal victories for blackjack players.
Ken Uston was born Kenneth Senzo Usui in 1935 and was a Yale University economics student by the age of 16. He also went on to Harvard, where he got his Masters in Business Administration. Uston led a relatively successful business-oriented life until he met Al Francesco, a fellow Blackjack Hall of Fame member, and the two became good friends. Francesco taught him all he knew about blackjack and Uston was born again – as a card player. He quit his job, joined a card-counting blackjack team and set out on the life of a professional gambler.
The Blackjack Big Player was the Key to Blackjack Team Play
Blackjack teams consisted of five or six "counters" who placed small bets at various blackjack tables in the casino. By counting cards using mathematical systems, the counters were able to determine when the odds of the game had moved in their favor. At that point, they would signal the "big players" on the team, who would come to the table, place big bets, and win big money. Uston’s card-counting career was based mostly in Atlantic City after gambling was legalized in that city.
Ken Uston and his blackjack team won millions of dollars at the blackjack tables, but casino owners were not happy. Uston was assaulted, arrested, and banned from the casinos. To evade the bans, he used disguises; eventually, he became almost as well known as a master of disguise as he was as a master of blackjack. Eventually, after getting fed up with being banned from casinos, Uston sued… and won. As a result, the casinos made it more difficult to count cards, but Atlantic City casinos were no longer allowed to ban card counters.
Ken Uston: “The Big Player”
Ken Uston’s real claim to fame was his book, “The Big Player,” which was published in 1977. In this book, he outlined the methods of blackjack team play. The result of Uston’s book was twofold: on one hand the casinos were on the lookout from then on for card-counting teams; on the other hand, many of the great blackjack teams sharpened their skills through techniques they learned in Uston’s book and went on to greatness after its publication. The MIT Team, for instance, was formed after the publication of Uston’s groundbreaking work.
Uston’s career as an author didn’t stop with “The Big Player.” In the 1980s he wrote several best-selling books on blackjack and subsequently became something of an expert on home video games. But blackjack was his first and true love and, as a member of several card-counting blackjack teams, Uston won millions of dollars at the tables. Ken Uston died at the early age of 52 in 1987 and was inducted posthumously into the Blackjack Hall of Fame.
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