Ken Uston
Ken Uston (January 12, 1935 September 19, 1987) was a famous blackjack player, strategist, and author, credited with popularizing the concept of team play at blackjack.
During the early to mid 1970s he gained widespread notoriety for perfecting techniques to do team card counting in numerous casinos worldwide, earning millions of dollars from the casinos, with some bets as high as $12,000 on a single card. He then became famous for being banned from casinos around the world, and became a master of disguise as he would adopt various costumes to conceal his identity and still play.
He is also known for filing a high-profile lawsuit against the casinos, and successfully received a ruling from the New Jersey courts that casinos could not bar someone simply for counting cards. Many casinos changed their systems in response, increasing the number of decks in games, or changing rules to increase the house edge. In the early 1980s, Uston also authored several popular books on video games and personal computers. He was the subject of a 1981 segment on 60 Minutes, and in 2005, he was the subject of the History Channel documentary, “The Black Jack Man”.
History
Uston was born Kenneth Senzo Usui in New York City, the oldest of three children to Elsie Lubitz, a native of Austria, and Senzo Usui, a Japanese immigrant and businessman. At the age of 16, Uston was accepted to and henceforth began attending Yale University, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Shortly after graduating from Yale, he went on to earn an MBA from Harvard University. He became district manager of the Southern New England Telephone Co., then corporate planning manager for American Cement. He subsequently relocated to San Francisco, California, quickly climbing the corporate ladder to become a Senior Vice-President at the Pacific Stock Exchange. On weekends, he spent time in the casinos, becoming what the Cleveland Plain Dealer called “a genius card-counter”.
