That meant that if, say, you got an ace in the first hand, you were in fact less likely to get an ace in the next hand. At the time, the dealer dealt from the same deck for several hands in a row. Thorp saw that blackjack, also known as 21, was different. GOLDSTEIN: If the roulette wheel comes up red on one spin, the odds of whether it's going to come up red on the next spin don't change. But in 1959, when Ed Thorp was a math geek just out of grad school, he realized that blackjack is fundamentally different than other casino games.ĮDWARD THORP: Most of the games, whatever happens on one trial or one play of the game doesn't have any influence on what's going to happen next. And again and again, they've discovered that in the long run, the house always wins. JACOB GOLDSTEIN, BYLINE: For hundreds of years, really smart people have tried to figure out how to get an edge in casino games.

Jacob Goldstein of our Planet Money podcast has the story. He beat blackjack and then he went on to transform the world of investing. Thorp has just written a book called 'A Man For All Markets' about how he did just that. But until Ed Thorp came along, no one had figured out how to beat it. The card game blackjack has been around a long time.