If you believe in luck, you are hardly alone. As a matter of fact over 90% of the US population believes in luck. This is interesting because over 60% of our population believes strongly in God. Generally speaking, most people that believe in a higher being of creation also believe that God’s “will” plays a significant part in what happens in our daily lives, and our human endeavors.
It’s hard to say exactly where the theory of luck came from, because mathematically we can demonstrate theLuck Formula:
Luck = the accumulation of an edge + the absence of an edge
In other words, luck = the sum of the values over a certain period of time. In the 1850s, mathematician Edward Thorp published a book laying out a method of creating a system for playing the game of ” twenty-one” or ” twenty-onepeed” in which players were dealt an Ace and a King. The Ace was designated as the higher card and the King as the lower card. Every time a player had this card in his hand, he had a choice: either the Ace or the King would win, provided that the player’s hand had a total value of exactly twenty-one. If the player had more than twenty-one, however, the Ace and King would be regarded as “stiff cards”, and the player would lose. The idea of card counting had actually been proposed as early as the 18th century, though it wasn’t widely accepted until the late 1960s.
As early as the late 1700s, the game of twenty-one was played by the upper classes. It was highly popular between the decks, and is still among the most popular table games in the world.
Perhaps the earliest recorded Rolls Royale was held in 1744, when the Guards played cards on the condition that the participants would swear never to reveal their cards. This may have been the earliest known instance of the actual game of twenty-one.
A postal regulation of hotels and casinos in New France (now Quebec) included the requirement that the stakes kept in each hand be according to the value of the cards in the hands of the players. Thus, for instance, if a player used Kings as his hand, and his hand was valued at 9, the player was required to take his stake and not reveal the cards. To compensate for this, the game of Twenty-one was played with cards valued according to their face value with face down.
It was during the American Civil War from 1861-1865 that the game of Twenty-one, with its double hand value of ten, was played with the cards valued as their face value with the Kings removed. This appears to have been the biggest source of the American notion of blackjack, as the original game of Twenty-one had no face cards. Instead, the cards were valued according to their face value, with the Ace given the highest value card. This of course gave the casino a big advantage, and so was born the idea that the house could beat the player in any game of chance.
In response to the growing casino Phenomena, a New Orleansian court established a Commission of Gambling and established the first legal gambling commission in the world in 1866. Coins were no longer used as a means of representing currency, and the betting custom grew larger to the point that authorities felt the need to outlaw it.
Desperate to stem the tide of gamblers, gambling was made illegal in all but a few states. strained by the multiplying avenues of illegal betting, and the growing population of gamblers, Congress in 1875 passed the Gambling Deposit Statute. As the first step of what would be a series of legislation aimed at stopping what had become a flood of humanity, this act supported the claim of the states that had licensed gambling, and made it illegal to gamble within the state lines.
Within a few years, the largely unregulated nature of American gambling was ruffling the financial systems of the European gambling monopolies, and the resultant conflict helped to create the need for federal intervention. Anearsaying the likely success of such intervention, in 1884, Congress passed the Sherman Silver Act. The legislation worked its way through the railroads and other commercial concerns, and finally royal authority made the regulation of gambling internationally the mechanism for the export of American manual and technological skills.
TheSherman Silver Actof 1892, was a direct challenge to the monopolies that had grown up during theenoarchy.monopoly gamesof Nevada, Omaha Hold’em, roulette, and slots that had all become enormously popular throughout North America. The act incurred the wrath of the monopolies and the financial institutions that inevitably resulted in the conditions that were conducive to the conditions that the businesses needed. In short, the Sherman Act was a direct challenge to the existence of today’s monopoly gambling industry.