Blackjack Hacking - World’s First Wearable Computer

November 7th, 2006

Heres a tale that some of you will probably have heard before, it begins in the 1950’s with a group of scientists setting out to analyze the odds and statistics of various casino games. They made an astonishing discovery, they found that blackjack, unlike the other games, could actually be predicted and therefore rigged.

This discovery led to the birth of ‘card counting’. This new way of playing blackjack almost guaranteed a win every time, it relied on the fact that the same deck was used constantly and was not shuffled. With this in mind, it was possible to count the number of high and low cards that had already been dealt and predict with quite amazing accuracy how your hand was going to be dealt.

This method was a success for a few gifted individuals who had the amazing abaility to keep track of which cards had been dealt already. But as you can imagine, a few drinks later and your memory aint quite what it used to be
This is where Keith Taft comes in, Keith was a scientist working out of California in the 1970’s. He contacted world renowned black jack player Ken Uston and told him he had developed the world’s first wearable computer, but this was no ordinary machine. The computer was designed purely to assist a player in counting cards at blackjack. It took all the pressure off the player and allowed them to relax into a game whilst still ensuring they had track of the cards.

After several revisions of the machine, including a nasty mishap involving a leaking battery and burnt skin, the final prototype was finished. Named ‘George’ it was the size of an eyeglass case and allowed the user to strap it discreetly to their body to aviod detection by the casino bosses.

‘George’ operated by uising a four switch inpuit worn on the hand of the player, the machine in turn relayed information back to the user using a series of vibrations in the same way morse code works.

The machine was first trialed on February 1, 1977 in the Goldengate casino in Las Vegas. It was a success earning Taft several hundred dollars, a successful first trial

Many new versions of ‘George’ were created including one that had the vibrating device hidden in the shoe, and even version that relayed sgnals via a radio link to other players at the table.

Ken and George then took on a whole team of blackjack players and trained them to use the machines, they were then sent off to various casinos in teams to take the blackjack tables for everything!

Their downfall came in 1977 when one of their members was caught in the Harrah’s casino in Las Vegas. The machine was discovered and he was arrested. Although the FBI later dropped the case after failing to figure out how the blackjack computer worked!

But byt his time, card counting and blackjack computers were well and truly out in the open, casinos began shuffling cards randomly throughout blackjack games to defeat the card counters. But having generated thousands of dollars in 3 months, and managing to baffle the FBI, i doubt the blackjack players were too unhappy……

The moral of this story? Don’t be greedy!

If you want to find out more about the blackjack computer then I suggest hunting down a copy of a BBC documentary called ‘Making Millions the easy way’