So far the history of blackjack is basically similar to that of many other card games, including the following brackets of Prohibition, the underground and the "rebirth" in 1931 in the casinos of Las Vegas, where he became gradually more and more popular, so that several scientists began to be interested in the mechanics of the game. The first was Roger Baldwin and his associates, who in 1953 wrote a small first statistical study on the subject.

Edward Oakley Thorp was the one who first introduced the technique of blackjack card counting. Thorp was a mathematician, and became interested in blackjack to the fact that in this game, unlike the others, the cards were not shuffled in one hand in the deck, but put it aside. Thorp realized that blackjack was a game unlike any other, because the outcome of each hand influenced the later: the cards in the previous rounds could not get out, unlike other games where every hand could hypothetically equal to recur if itself an infinite number of times. Thorp wrote a book on "Beat the Dealer" ("Beat the Dealer", chock full of mathematical formulas and rules and therefore difficult to understand, but still considered a milestone on the subject.