Astounding!

I was astounded to discover that the "Four Horsemen" - the Army math heads who developed the first version of basic strategy in the 1950s using manual adding machines - were not charter members of the Blackjack Hall of Fame!

How in the hell...? The developers of basic strategy not charter members of the Hall of Fame? I mean, whaddya have to see?!

Oh well, eventually they were inducted.

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A-Bombs and Multiple Columbuses
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The Four Horsemen were like the Hiroshima A-bomb going off over the blackjack landscape -- paradigm changing. Things could/would never be the same. Thorpe was like the second A-bomb going off over Nagasaki. Everything else that has transpired since has been small potatoes, relatively speaking, IMHO.

These guys -- the four Horsemen and E.O Thorpe -- were the Columbuses of advantage blackjack play. All who followed were merely settlers in a New World, following in their pioneering footsteps. (Don't mention the American Indians because it will screw up the analogy :0)

The Four Horsemen of Aberdeen consisted of four men-Baldwin, Chantey, Maisel, and McDermott. The team is refered to as the Baldwin group. They came up with the first BS published value -.62%. Years later it was discovered that an arithmetic error had been made and their approximate method actually yielded -.3%. They broke into print in September, 1956, with an article in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. The next year, they came out with a book entitled Playing Blackjack to Win. It was a masterpiece ($1.75). It went out of print after a few years. At about the same time of the Baldwin group another pioneer Richard Epstein, an electronics engineer using a Remington Rand 1103 computer obtained -.14%.Then Allan Wilson inventing the Wilson Point Count and playing it sucessfuly in the 1950's. Later came Thorpe then Julian Braun of the IBM Corporation. Braun simulated tens of millions of hands and came up with about +.1% for the basic SD LV game (back then).
All these pioneers should be in the Hall of Fame including Greasy John.
As far as the American Indians...their getting their money back.

The Four Horsemen took our knowledge of the game from the Stone Age to the Industrial Age. Wilson and Thorp took it to the Space Age.

Arnold Snyder's Big Book of Blackjack

Yes. Arnold Snyder's stuff is great! I so very much respect Arnold Snyder's body of work.

I wrote "nt" in the previous post when really there was a link to click on.

I realize this is an old thread, but better late than never.

Heres a link to Greasy John info: