The Man who Won over $1 Million Dollars Playing Blackjack

You may have never heard of him, but Ken Uston was the king of blackjack in the 1970s. He used his superior intelligence to beat the dealer in casinos in both Atlantic City and Las Vegas, the only two locations with legalized gambling in the US at the time. Born in New York City to a mixed Japanese-American family, his amazing intelligence and skill with math and numbers was apparent from an early age.

He graduated high school at the young age of 16 and attended both Yale and Harvard, eventually majoring in business.Even though by his early thirties he was a respected and established businessman, he was fascinated by the gambling world and in particular the many card counting techniques that were first developed by pioneering blackjack strategist and mathematician Edward Thorpe. In “Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One” Thorpe explained to the masses for the first time about the basic foundations of card counting in easy to understand language appropriate for all levels of players. Using Thorpe’s work as a base, he started to develop his own blackjack strategies and decided that the best way to win big at the tables was to organize teams of card counters.