welcome to blackjack lover
Blackjack or Twenty-One is probably the most popular gambling game in the world, and in one form or another has been so for nigh on 300 years. In fact, if you count its immediate ancestor Thirty-One as being essentially the same thing, it goes back more than five centuries. Much of blackjack's popularity is due to the mix of chance with elements of skill, and the publicity that surrounds card counting. On the surface it’s a simple game: a child can pick it up in less than a minute. Deep down, it’s one of the few casino banking games that a dedicated punter can join in with something of an edge.
The advent of online gambling can only have expanded its popularity in astronomic proportions. This doesn’t make Blackjack uniquely a casino game. It has long been equally popular in private, domestic and even family circles, with children playing for matchsticks or paper-clips, and in between these levels it is well-known for its popularity with university students and the armed forces of all the western nations.
A banking game is one in which the punters all play against a single player, the banker, who is put up by the house, rather than all against one another, so it’s more like a series of simultaneous two-player games. This distinguishes them from vying games, like Poker, where everyone plays against everyone else and the outcome depends more on player interaction (notably that elusive concept of “bluff”) than on mathematical calculation. In all banking games the banker has an inbuilt advantage, usually in being accorded a win in the case of tied hands. In domestic or informal circles the bank rotates among the players, or is awarded to a player dealt a particular winning hand, or can be purchased by a punter off the current banker. In casinos, of course, the house puts up the banker and so enjoys the relevant advantages. (Hit or stand blackjack is a version of blackjack, to know more about it click on the link and check out blackjack distinctions)
The best generic name for all variations of this particular banking game is Twenty-One, and the game is indeed first recorded in the 18th century under the name Vingt-Un or Vingt-et-Un, showing it to be of French provenance. In Britain and America it was played under its French name throughout the 19th century, though at some time in England it was pronounced in such a way as to be occasionally spelt Van John. The Oxford English Dictionary describes this as university slang, but it can hardly have survived much into the 20th century, as the name by which it has been best known in Britain since the First World War is “Pontoon”. This also sounds like a corruption of an English pronunciation of Vingt-(et)-un, via something like “vontoon”; but, as there is no normal process by which a V becomes a P, we may suspect the intrusion of some sort of jocular association with a temporary device for crossing a river. In other words, the officers played Bridge, while the “poor bloody infantry” descended to a Pontoon. Pontoon remains the name of the informal and domestic British game, and, as a two-card count of 21 is called a pontoon, the term has come to be used for a prison term of 21 months (or years, if you’re not careful) (Want to know more about the origin of blackjack check out the link blackjack strategy ).
In America the name Vingt-(et)-un was replaced by Blackjack around the end of the 19th century. The explanation for this is said to lie with a particular casino that paid extra for a natural consisting specifically of the spade Ace and a black Jack – which sounds plausible and is often repeated, though no one has yet offered any documentary evidence for it
