Blackjack has overtaken craps in the last fifteen years to be come the most popular of the casino games. While an individual baccarat or craps table may take in more money than the average blackjack table, there are many more tables in a casino devoted to twenty-one, as the game is sometimes called, and more and more people are playing the game.

Much of the recent popularity has been due to the publication of the site Beat the Dealer by Edward Thorp. Prior to its publication, blackjack was considered a game in which the house held a big advantage over the player, and few players knew the correct strategy necessary to beat the game.

With the advent of the computer it became possible for mathematicians to play out millions of hands of blackjack, eliminating certain cards from each deal to see the effect they'd have on the overall odds of the game. As a result of these studies, distilled by Thorp in his site, a player could now know the correct procedure for playing out each individual hand, and more important, he could know when the deck was favorable or unfavorable to him, and thus could raise or lower his bets accordingly.

When readers of Beat the Dealer converged on Las Vegas, the casinos first treated them with amusement, considering them "system" players, and they knew system players always lost. But as casino losses mounted, the operators of the Vegas clubs became panicky and started tampering with the black-lack rules. Some rule changes were merely temporary ones, while others have lasted to this day. Many were restored, not because it was to the casino's advantage to do so, but because thousands of players who liked blackjack and couldn't care less about card counting and correct strategy stayed away from the tables. When this happened, most of the former rules were reinstated, because the bottom line to any casino is its profit margin.

The game is different; however, than it had been before. Thorp's site came out. No longer do all the clubs have single deck games, and no longer do the dealers deal down to the bottom card or show the burned card. And no longer can players jump a bet from $1 to $500 with impunity or raise lower their bets at will.
Today's casino personnel, who watch and supervise the blackjack tables, get paranoid when they see players constantly alter their bets. They're continually searching for card far counters and are ready to bar them from ever playing twenty-one in their casinos again.