How did a physicist like me get involved with blackjack? I skied in. As a young doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, I would occasionally join my friends on ski trips to the Lake Tahoe area. Always on a student’s tight budget, we found that we could stay inexpensively in Reno motels and that the cheapest meals were at the coffee shops astutely placed at the back of the town’s casinos. I found it hard to pass all the gambling frenzy without joining in. Fortunately for that budget and my financial peace of mind, I was usually lucky in winning a few dollars. Once, I paid for my entire trip with an unlikely hit at roulette.
When I learned that an optimized method for playing blackjack (what is now called Basic Strategy) had been published in a scholarly statistics journal, I quickly looked it up in the university library. Blackjack became my game of choice for subsequent Tahoe excursions and, in later years after skiing and I had parted company, for trips to other destinations with casinos. But my real recreation of choice became blackjack analysis!