Peter Griffin
Peter A. Griffin (1937-1998) is one of the original seven members of the Blackjack Hall of Fame. The grandson of mathematician Frank Loxley Griffin, he authored The Theory of Blackjack, considered a classic work of analyzing the mathematics behind the game of blackjack.
Griffin was a native of New Jersey, one of three children, with a brother, Alan, and a sister, Barbara Dann. Their father was an actuary who went on to manage an insurance company. Griffin’s grandfather was a mathematician at Reed College who had written mathematics textbooks. Griffin grew up in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, and married a woman named Lydia.
He studied at Portland State University, and received a Master’s degree from the University of California at Davis. He taught statistics, calculus and differential equations at California State University from 1965 until his death on October 18, 1998 from prostate cancer.
His first exposure to blackjack was in 1970, when he proposed a course on the mathematics of gambling, and went to Nevada to do some research. He, as the New York Times put it, “promptly got his clock cleaned”, and this incentivized him to do more serious research on the subject. He was known for compiling extensive statistics on blackjack players in Atlantic City, and then comparing patterns against players in Las Vegas or Reno. He was one of the first to calculate the percentage disadvantage of an “average” blackjack player, 2%.
His best known book was written in 1978, The Theory of Blackjack: The Compleat Card Counter Guide to the Casino Game of 21, and is considered a classic in the field, along with Edward Thorp’s 1962 Beat the Dealer.
