Ken Uston (born January 12, 1935 - September 19, 1987) was a famous blackjack player who became notorious for using team card counting techniques in casinos during the early 1970s. The official website about Ken Uston is located at Uston.com.
Uston attended Yale University at the age of 16 and later got an MBA from Harvard University. He rapidly climbed the corporate ladder to become the youngest senior vice-president in the hisotry of the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco. Uston claimed to have an IQ of 169.
In a Blackjack Forum interview,[1] Uston reported that he became fascinated by blackjack after meeting professional gambler Al Francesco in a poker game. Francesco had recently launched the first big player type of blackjack card counting team, and he recruited Uston to be one of his big players.
Uston was a genius of self-promotion. Although Al Francesco and other team members have reported in Blackjack Forum interviews that Uston made very little money for the team, Uston co-authored with Roger Rapoport a book called The Big Player in which he claimed credit for many of the accomplishments of his fellow team members, including Bill Erb. Soon after the publication of Uston's book, Al Francesco's team found itself effectively barred from playing in Las Vegas.
Uston moved to Atlantic City when gambling was legalized in 1976 and formed a profitable blackjack team of his own there, discussed at length in a 2005 Blackjack Forum interview with team member Darryl Purpose. Uston, however, was soon barred from playing at that location as well as at most other casinos in the world. He filed suit against Resorts International, claiming that casinos did not have the right to bar skilled players. In Uston v. Resorts International Hotel Inc., 445 A.2d 370 (N.J. 1982), the New Jersey State Supreme Court ruled that Atlantic City casinos did not have the authority to decide whether skilled players could be barred. To date, Atlantic City casinos are not allowed to bar card counters. Many skilled blackjack players argue that Uston's legal victory actually worsened blackjack in Atlantic City because casinos responded to the court ruling by adding decks, moving up the shuffle point, and taking other measures to decrease the skilled player's potential advantage.
After his barrings, Uston adopted a wide variety of disguises to continue to play blackjack, now on his own, without a team. He was known for his aggressive and flamboyant playing style. In an article in Blackjack Forum, Arnold Snyder describes playing with Ken Uston at Circus Circus in Las Vegas near the end of Uston's life. Uston was disguised as a worker from Hoover Dam and got away with spreading his bets from table minimum to table maximum on a single-deck game. Since this took place at a time when card counting was well understood by casinos, and since the primary clue by which casinos detect card counting is a card counter's bet spread, most card counters would also consider Uston a genius at card counting camouflage.
Uston is the author of the book Million Dollar Blackjack (ISBN 0-89746-068-5). It is considered to be a definitive book on blackjack, with important details about professional gamblers' techniques for gaining an advantage at the game. Uston also authored another book, Ken Uston On Blackjack (ISBN 0-942637-56-9).
In the 1980s, Uston wrote several books about arcade games and home video games, including Mastering PAC-MAN (ISBN 0-451-11899-5) and Ken Uston's Guide to Buying and Beating the Home Video Games (ISBN 0-451-11901-0). He also licensed his name to Coleco for the ColecoVision game, Ken Uston's Blackjack/Poker.
On September 19, 1987, Ken Uston, at age 52, was found dead in his rented apartment in Paris, apparently from a heart attack.