Editorial: Ken Uston - GamblingPlanet Guide

With his talent, intelligence and charisma, Ken Uston was destined for success. He could have been a financial wizard, and did work for a time at the Pacific Stock Exchange during the 1960s. He could have been a professional musician, and was a prominent jazz piano player in the San Francisco area. He could have been a best-selling author, and did sell many of his books on his favorite subject.

What Ken Uston is known for more than anything, though, is his track record at card counting.

Ken Uston: Birth and Early Childhood

Ken Uston was born in New York City on 12 January 1935. His birth name was Kenneth Senzo Usui; his father was a Japanese immigrant and his mother was from Austria. He was an outstanding student; he graduated from high school at sixteen and attended Yale University. He graduated with honors as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa national honor society and earned a Masters in Business Administration from Harvard Business School.

Racial Prejudice

During World War II, Ken Uston faced severe racial prejudice due to his Japanese ancestry. At one point, US authorities detained his father in an internment camp, as they did to many Japanese-Americans and Japanese immigrants, for fear that he was acting as an enemy spy. Reportedly, he changed his name to "Ken Uston" to avoid the stigma of his Japanese heritage.

Early Blackjack Career

Just shy of turning forty years of age, Ken Uston heard about a professional Blackjack player who had developed a way to beat casino Blackjack games. The Blackjack system did not involve any form of Blackjack cheating, but instead revolved around "card counting". He arranged to meet the man and learn his secrets. From that point on, Ken Uston became one of the first and most successful card counters in Las Vegas. 

King of the Card Counters

Ken Uston's combination of intelligence, memory and drive led him to become one of the leading experts in the Blackjack system of card counting. Instead of using the usual ways to cheat at Blackjack, such as marking cards or peeking at a dealer's hole card, card counters would remember which cards had been dealt in previous hands to determine which cards had the best odds of coming in future hands.

First Blackjack Team

After he learned this new Blackjack system, Ken Uston became the leader of the premier "Blackjack team" in Las Vegas. In a Blackjack team, one player will play at the lowest limit while tracking the cards in the shoe. When the "count" favors the player, the low-limit player will signal his cohort on the Blackjack team to make big bets. 

Uston and the other members of his Blackjack team used this system for years to beat casino Blackjack games all over the world. Every casino they hit suspected them of trying to cheat at Blackjack, but they could never prove that the teams used any of the typical cheating methods.

Banned from Vegas

Eventually, the casinos would have their revenge by banning Ken Uston and his players from every casino Blackjack game at most of the major gaming destinations, including Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Monte Carlo. Casinos would also develop other Blackjack systems, such as no-mid shoe entry and announcing when a player was splitting pairs of ten-value cards, to deter many card counters.

Author and Scholar

When the card counting well dried up, Ken Uston turned his skills to writing Blackjack books. In most of his Blackjack books, he discussed such things as basic strategy, bet sizing, and even shared a few card counting tricks. Many of his Blackjack books became best sellers and sparked a new interest in casino Blackjack.

Ken Uston also pursued lawsuits against Atlantic City casinos that had barred him and accused him of trying to cheat at Blackjack. He proved that his Blackjack system was legal and within the rules of casino Blackjack. While the judges ruled in his favor, the casinos still barred card counters as "undesirables".

Death and Legacy

Ken Uston died on 19 September 1987 in Paris due to a heart attack. Not only did he author several notable Blackjack books, he also wrote several guides to early-generation video games. He licensed his name to several gambling simulation software packages for some of the first personal computers during the 1980s, years before gamblers were considered public figures and targets for endorsement deals.

His success would also go on to inspire the infamous "MIT Blackjack Teams" of the 1980s and 1990s, the source for the movie "21". One of those who picked up a Ken Uston book was the long-time leader of one of those teams, Semyon Dukach.

Ken Uston: Conclusion

Without a doubt, Ken Uston can be considered one of the major contributors to a better understanding of the game of Blackjack. He brought a face and energy to the world of casino Blackjack, which had previously been thought of as seedy and dangerous. His Blackjack books continue to guide new generations of aspiring Blackjack players around the world.