Math maven Peter Griffin (1937-1998) is best known in Blackjack circles as the man who came up with unique research parameters known as Betting Correlation (BC) and Playing Efficiency (PE). His contributions to the game earned him a posthumous spot in the Blackjack Hall of Fame among its first group of inductees in 2002.
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A Natural with Numbers
Peter Griffin was born in New Jersey during the Great Depression as one of three children. The family moved frequently as he grew up, first to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and then to Chicago, Illinois before arriving in Portland, Oregon. If there is gene for math talent, it was passed down to the boy from his grandfather, Frank Loxley Griffin, who taught at Reed College and had written mathematics textbooks, through his father, an actuary who later headed an insurance company.
As a teen, Griffin excelled in math. He received his undergraduate degree from Portland State University and went on the get a Master’s degree from the University of California at Davis. Thereafter, Griffin taught statistics, calculus and differential equations at California State University-Sacramento from 1965 until his death 33 years later from prostate cancer.
During his tenure at CSUS, Griffin proposed offering a course on the mathematics of gambling. In 1970, he traveled to Nevada for research and, according to an article in the New York Times, “promptly got his clock cleaned.” The initial loss caused Griffin to conduct even more serious research on Blackjack, in particular. He compiled and compared extensive statistics on players in Atlantic City with those in Las Vegas or Reno.
Griffin was among the first to calculate the House Edge at 2% against “average” blackjack players. He then went on to identify how changes in basic strategy could affect the odds of winning—the seeds of what would later become known as “advantage play.” In 1979, the researcher’s first book was published—“The Theory of Blackjack: The Compleat Card Counter’s Guide to the Casino Game of 21”—and it is today regarded as a classic in the field of gaming.
A Lasting Legacy
During Griffin’s study of Blackjack, he became quite proficient at card counting. It has been said that he could keep track of six different “running counts” in his head at one time. Although he achieved some success at the tables as result, Griffin never let the game eclipse his true passion, which was teaching. He once said that Blackjack was “boring” and wrote, “Long since disabused of the notion that I can win a fortune in the game, my lingering addiction is to the pursuit of solutions to the myriad mathematical questions posed by this intriguing game.”
Among an entire generation of card counters, Griffin became a cult figure, owing not only to the depth of his mathematical analysis and the clarity of his step-by-step explanations of calculations but also his keen sense of humor, which delighted both card players and mathematicians alike. Before his death, he was much in demand as a visiting expert at casinos and gambling conferences around the world.
The New York Times wrote of Griffin in his obituary that he was “a man who led a life of such meticulous precision that fellow faculty members could set their watches by the times he got his mail, arrived at his office or started home on his bicycle, as he did even when he lived 13 miles from campus.” Yet it was just this attention to detail, which permeated his research, that allowed later Blackjack specialists such as Arnold Snyder, Stanford Wong and Ken Uston to reach even greater heights counting cards.