Ken Uston: The Blackjack Hall of Famer Who Sued Casinos

Ken Uston was a Harvard-educated Pacific Stock Exchange executive who became the most public blackjack card counter of the 1970s and who sued several New Jersey casinos for barring him. The short version of his significance is that he converted the private dispute between a skilled player and a casino into a public regulatory question, and that the question was answered differently in different jurisdictions, which is why the current regulatory map of exclusion policies looks the way it does.

The career before the lawsuits

Uston was born Kenneth Senzo Usui in 1935. He held an MBA from Harvard Business School and had worked at the Pacific Stock Exchange as a senior vice president. In the early 1970s he joined a blackjack team organized by Al Francesco, a Los Angeles based counter who had developed the big-player system. The system divides the team's labor between spotters, who play small bets at multiple tables while tracking the count, and the big player, who is signaled into a favorable count by a spotter and arrives at the table to play large bets for a short time.

The big-player system defeated the standard casino countermeasures of the period. A spotter betting a minimum stake was difficult to identify as an advantage player through observation alone, because their own wagering pattern did not reflect the count. The big player, arriving briefly at a favorable table, did not accumulate the long observational record that surveillance used to identify counters.

Uston played as a big player on Francesco's team and later organized his own teams. By his own accounts, which are broadly consistent with other team members' accounts published later, the teams won substantial sums in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and in casinos abroad during the mid-1970s. The exact figures are not independently verifiable, but the scale was large enough to make Uston a recognizable figure in the surveillance community.

The countermeasures and the bans

Casinos responded to team play through several mechanisms. Surveillance departments built photographic databases of identified counters, shared identifications across properties through informal networks and later through services such as Griffin Investigations, and began to bar identified players from entering casino floors. The practice was not uniform. Some properties barred only specific players on narrow grounds; others enforced broad exclusions that extended to any player who had been barred at a major competing property.

Uston, being publicly identified, was barred from multiple properties in Nevada in the late 1970s. When Atlantic City opened for casino gambling in 1978, he played there as well and was barred there too.

The lawsuits

Uston filed suit in New Jersey against Resorts International, the first Atlantic City casino. The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in 1982 in Uston v. Resorts International Hotel, Inc. that the casino could not bar a player for card counting, because the state's Casino Control Commission had preempted the common-law right of innkeepers to exclude patrons. The Commission, not the individual casino, had regulatory authority over who could be excluded, and the Commission had not promulgated a rule permitting exclusion for counting.

The practical consequence is that in New Jersey, casinos cannot bar a player simply for counting cards. They can, and do, use other countermeasures. They shuffle the shoe more frequently when a counter is identified, reduce the penetration of the deck, limit the maximum bet, and in extreme cases simply refuse to deal additional rounds. These countermeasures reduce the advantage player's edge, often to zero, without resorting to exclusion.

In Nevada, the outcome was different. Nevada's common-law tradition of innkeeper exclusion was not preempted in the same way, and Nevada casinos retained the right to refuse service to identified counters. The Uston lawsuits did not challenge Nevada's regime with the same success.

The broader significance

Uston's lawsuits produced a real regulatory distinction that persists today. A blackjack player in Atlantic City who is identified as a counter will typically find the game structured against them through countermeasures rather than through exclusion. A player in Las Vegas who is identified as a counter may simply be asked to leave. The distinction reflects different answers to a question about whether the casino floor is a public accommodation subject to non-discrimination norms or a private business with full exclusion rights.

A player working out where to deploy their time should read this regulatory geography carefully. Atlantic City's nonexclusion regime is useful for the identified counter, but its countermeasures are aggressive and the advantage is hard to realize. Nevada's exclusion regime is clearer and, in some ways, cleaner, because the player either plays or does not, without the interim of degraded conditions.

The later life

Uston wrote several books on blackjack, including Million Dollar Blackjack in 1981 and Ken Uston on Blackjack in 1986, which described team play and the big-player system for a general audience. He also wrote on other subjects, including a book on video-game strategy during the early 1980s arcade boom. He died in Paris in September 1987 at the age of fifty-two. The cause of death was reported as heart failure.

He was inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame in 2003, in the inaugural class that also included Al Francesco, Edward Thorp, and several other pioneering advantage players.

The lesson for the modern player

The student of blackjack can take two things from Uston's career. The first is that organized team play with division of labor can defeat standard surveillance, at least for a period, before the surveillance community adapts. The second is that the regulatory environment in which the team plays determines the set of countermeasures available to the casinos, and that the player's expected return depends on that regulatory environment as much as on the player's skill.

A player identifying themselves to the surveillance apparatus, whether through publicity or through distinctive play, is trading an increase in current income for a shortening of their career. Uston made that trade deliberately. His public visibility was a form of advertising for his books and for his later consulting work, and the bans and lawsuits were part of the package.

The quieter advantage player, by contrast, manages their visibility carefully, plays lower stakes across more properties, and extends their career by avoiding the identification that triggers the countermeasures. The two styles are not incompatible, but they are different business models built on the same mathematical foundation. Uston's contribution was to make the foundation legible in court, which is a durable contribution whether or not one chooses to follow his personal example.