The card game of blackjack is impossible to imagine without the personality of Ken Uston, the most famous blackjack player in the history of this game; he was popular during 1970s-80s as a person who used team play to beat casinos out of their money.

Ken Uston won millions of dollars while playing blackjack professionally; he made the concept of a team play at blackjack to be popular and widespread, and he was a great strategist. Started as a member of Al Francesco’s blackjack team, Uston soon became a professional blackjack player who gathered and managed his own blackjack team.

Heritage

Ken Uston is the author of a few books about blackjack where he described his concept of team play at blackjack and the usage of card counting while playing blackjack as a team. He is the author of following books:

• The Big Player
• Million Dollar Blackjack
• Ken Uston on Blackjack
• One Third of a Shoe

The detailed information about Uston’s books you can read here.

Being a great mathematician, Ken Uston was also the author of numerous guidebooks(computer ones) and video game strategy books which were written in 1980s.

Casinos’ nightmare, players’ hero

Ken Uston and his blackjack team were a real nightmare of all casinos; many pit bosses even banned Uston and prohibited him to visit their casinos. Well, anyway, Uston found a way how to enter casinos and continue playing his favorite game: it is a well-known fact that Ken Uston was a disguise master who wore different costumes in order to change his appearance.

This wonderful and amazing person also won the case against Atlantic City casinos which did not allow blackjack players to use card counting during a game, considering it to be the way of cheating. Uston was able to prove the fact that blackjack players had a right to use card counting as they did not use any devices for that except their own minds.

Blackjack was Ken Uston’s way of life, not just a way of earning big money. Many people call him to be an excellent player, a genius of blackjack, the brilliant author and the hero of blackjack. It was not surprising when, in 2003, the Blackjack Hall of Fame honored Uston as one of its seven initial members: he was a real idol and guru of blackjack, which name is impossible not to mention when speaking about the card game of blackjack, its history and its popular names.

Uston was honored to become the member of the Blackjack Hall of Fame posthumously: he was found dead in his Paris apartment in 1987; heart failure is believed to be the cause of his death. Ken Uston was just 52 when he died.

In 2005, Ken Uston had become the subject of the documentary film ‘The Blackjack Man’.