The History of Blackjack

Each online casino, worthy of attention in the current gambling environment, offers its visitors a lot of gaming entertainment, not the least of which is online Blackjack. This fascinating game is believed to have simple and clear rules, but to achieve a victory in it is a rather difficult and complicated task. For a reason, in these modern days, as well as many years ago, Blackjack online reveals a constant interest among gamblers at all the leading online sites. Visit top Canadian online casinos to start playing.

How It’s Played

The player’s main goal is to gain 21 points with his cards. In turn, there are some obligatory rules to consider:

• The number of points is defined by the denomination of the cards. Face cards are worth ten points, ace — 1 or 11, depending on the game situation.
• In the beginning of the play, two cards are drawn. Then you can get more.
• Exceeding 21 points leads to an instant loss (the player “busts”).
• To win, it is enough to gain more points than the dealer (but not to achieve more than 21).

These are the main and permanent rules of Blackjack, to which different platforms may add small variations concerning the size of bets, the order of adding cards, etc. In its bigger part, the game has preserved the same features as they were back in the seventeenth century — that is the date preferred by historians to point to the occurrence of Blackjack in its closest to the modern form.

Where It Began

In Europe, card games have been known since about the fifteenth century, when France formed a clear division of a deck of cards into four modern suits. As for the story of blackjack origin, gambling historians distinguish one basic version and two less plausible:

• It is most likely that the modern Blackjack is a “direct descendant” of the French game “Vingt et Un”. In favor of this version speaks the solution’s name (it means ‘twenty-one”) and the preserved descriptions of the rules, very similar to the modern version.
• There is a version about the Spanish origin of the game. Once there was a very popular solution “One and Thirty”, the goal of which is to gain thirty-one points.
• The most unexpected theory attributes the invention of Blackjack to the ancient Romans, great fans of gambling. Of course, in those days, the game didn’t resemble a modern version that much and was performed with the help of other items.

The Game Evolves

Whatever the roots of this game are, we can definitely state one thing — French colonists, who brought Blackjack to the New World, gave a new life to this gambling entertainment. In Canada, “Vingt et Un” appeared together with the first French settlers, who migrated to the continent in the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries. At first, the “Twenty-one” game wasn’t popular, yielding to poker and crabs. However, in the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a rapid growth in the activity’s famousness. By the way got its name by the designation of the Ace and Jack of Spades — Black and Jack correspondingly. Numerous tourists, returning from trips to the United States, brought the updated Blackjack to Canada and spread it across all the provinces in the shortest time.

Nowadays blackjack is confidently leading among card games on all important online platforms. Gambling online is allowed in all provinces of Canada, so there are no problems with access to this activity.

Keeping Count

The great popularity of the game has led to the fact that many gamblers began to create their own mathematical systems, allowing players to calculate the probability of winning. The basic principle was the calculation of cards that came out of the deck, and the method quickly became famous and quite effective. Modern rules use several decks for Blackjack, which makes counting much more difficult, but the game itself is more interesting and unpredictable then.