Six months after the United States entered World War I, the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground was established in Hartford Country, Maryland. Its purpose was to be used as a site for the testing of ordinance material. From 1917 onward, Aberdeen became a primary location for verifying the effectiveness of military weapons and stress testing vehicles to be used in combat. Today, it is the army’s oldest active proving ground in the country.
After World War II, an army sergeant named Wilbert Eddie Cantey (1931~2008) was stationed at Aberdeen. He was a mathematician, a former high school math teacher who had enlisted in the army as a statistician. He spent most of his time in those days crunching numbers with a form of mechanical calculator known as an “adding machine.” Electronic computers would not be introduced at the facility until years later. Little did Sgt. Cantey know what a challenge one young private in his analytical office was about to bring to him in 1953.
Can Blackjack Be Beat?
Like many young soldiers, Pvt. Roger R. Baldwin enjoyed playing cards with his buddies in the barracks. But Baldwin was no ordinary fish around a deck of cards. He had received his Master’s Degree in mathematics from Columbia University, and he found the strategy of gaming just as fascinating as winning a few bucks in a friendly game.
One day, a fellow card player suggested that they play some Blackjack, just like in the casinos of Las Vegas. Baldwin was unfamiliar with the game and asked about the rules. He was surprised to learn that the dealer had to conform to a set of fixed rules, such as drawing to a count of 16 and standing on 17. This led the private to begin considering a strategy for Blackjack play that would be based solely upon mathematics. There had to be an optimum way to play.
As he began to undertake his analysis, Baldwin quickly discovered the project’s math was much more complex than he could figure out by hand. That’s when he approached Cantey with the idea of “borrowing” an army calculator to work out the numbers. Cantey wasn’t much of a gambler, but he loved a good mathematical challenge. Soon he convinced another Columbia math graduate, James McDermott, to join them, along with a fourth collaborator, Herbert Maisel.
For the next year and half, the foursome spent all their free time devising an optimal strategy for playing Blackjack. Thousands of hours on nights and weekends were spent pounding numbers into the adding machines and applying probability theory to their search for a statistically verifiable, Blackjack-playing methodology.
The Optimum Strategy
At last in 1956, the four number-crunchers completed their research. Together, they published an eleven-page article in the September issue of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. It was entitled, “The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack”—the first serious attempt to reveal the proper was to play against the Las Vegas style game.
Interest in the article extended far beyond the audience of math geeks who subscribed to the Journal. Baldwin was inspired to write up and publish the strategy for lay readers in a small book entitled, “Playing Blackjack to Win: A New Strategy for the Game of 21.” It soon became one of the most widely used references on the subject.
Maisel, who went on to teach at Georgetown University, later recalled, “We were going to be young rich people. We worked out the best way to play the game.” However, in the course of their research, they also discovered a disturbing fact of casino Blackjack—the House had an edge over the players. As a result, they never tried to beat the casinos. As Maisel put it, “We figured out we would lose in the long run.”
For their role in publishing the world’s first accurate basic strategy for playing Blackjack, the so-called “Four Horsemen of Aberdeen” were honored in 2008 with induction into the Blackjack Hall of Fame. Cantey passed away a few months after the ceremony at the age of 77, at long last recognized as one of the “immortals” of Blackjack history.