Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott were known by Blackjack insiders as “The Four Horsemen”. After joining the Blackjack Hall of Fame at Max Rubin’s 12th annual, an invitation-only Blackjack Ball in Las Vegas in 2008, the Four Horsemen made a name for themselves by inventing what is said to be “how the game should be played”.
Saddle up and join us as we discover who the Four Horsemen really are, so that when you’re next playing online Blackjack at Paddy Power, you can use the inspiration of their strategy to see if you could be the next player in your very own Hall of Fame.
Roger Baldwin
While serving in the US Army in the mid-1950s, Baldwin created the first accurate Blackjack strategy. He had a master’s degree in mathematics from Columbia University, inspiring him to think about the math behind the game as he played in the barracks. When his hands could no longer keep up with his mind, he got permission to borrow one of the Army’s calculators so that he could master his work. He then teamed up with the other ‘Horsemen’ to complete the strategy, which then went on to be published as an 11-page article called The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack in September 1956.
Wilbert Cantey
Cantey started out wanting to be a priest but was encouraged to leave this dream behind because of his pool-hustling and card-playing habits. He went on to pursue a career in mathematics, but life had other ideas and found him joining the army in the mid-1950s, where he met Rodger Baldwin and the rest of the prolific group.
Herbert Maisel
After his career in the Army, Maisel went on to become a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. Alongside the other Horsemen, Maisel is credited with creating the first accurate Blackjack strategy.
James McDermott
James McDermott also became an inductee to the Blackjack Hall of Fame in 2008 for using his mathematical talents, with just a pen, paper, and a simple Army calculator to perfect the Horsemen’s strategy, which was later published into a book called ‘Paying Blackjack to Win: A New Strategy for the Game of 21’, in 1957. After serving in the Army, he went on to become an executive at International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).
The Strategy
With a published book, that is considered to be one of the most important Blackjack texts ever written, it’s no wonder that professional players have always considered the four friends as legends.
The Four Horsemen discovered the first legitimate card-counting system, which gave the player an advantage over the house.
The strategy was born out of a discussion about which rules to use whilst playing the game, which gave one of the young Private’s an idea – to decide on a certain set of rules for the dealer so you could accurately calculate the probabilities of winning and losing in every situation. It took a total of two years to perfect their calculations by hand, which was later proven on computers that their strategy was virtually perfect.
When professional Blackjack player Arnold Snyder put their strategy to the test, he found that their hit/stand strategies, both hard and soft, are 100% accurate. He used their recommendations that hard totals of 12 should be hit against two and three and that soft totals of 18 should only be hit against 9 and 10, to improve his own gameplay.
Other professional players believe that if it wasn’t for The Four Horsemen, no one else would be on the Hall of Fame, as they truly did calculate the best way to play Blackjack.
