Editing Card counting (section)

=== Teams ===
{{More footnotes needed|date=May 2012}}
In the 1970s Ken Uston was the first to write about a tactic of card counting he called the Big Player Team. The book was based on his experiences working as a "big player" (BP) on [[Al Francesco]]'s teams. In big-player blackjack teams a number of card counters, called "spotters", are dispatched to tables around a casino, where their responsibility is to keep track of the count and signal to the big player when the count indicates a player advantage. The big player then joins the game at that table, placing maximum bets at a player advantage. When the spotter indicates that the count has dropped, they again signal the BP to leave the table. By jumping from table to table as called in by spotters, BP avoids all play at a disadvantage. In addition, since BP's play appears random and irrational, they avoid detection by the casinos. The spotters, who are doing the actual counting, are not themselves changing their bet size or strategy, so they are relatively inconspicuous.

With this style of play, a number of blackjack teams have cleared millions of dollars through the years. Well-known blackjack teams with documented earnings in the millions include those run by Al Francesco, Ken Uston, Tommy Hyland, various groups from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ([[MIT]]), and, most recently, a team called "The Greeks". Ken Uston wrote about blackjack team play in ''Million Dollar Blackjack'' ({{ISBN|0-89746-068-5}}), although many of the experiences he represents as his own in his books actually happened to other players, especially Bill Erb, a BP Uston worked with on Al Francesco's team. [[Ben Mezrich]] also covers team play in his book ''[[Bringing Down the House (book)|Bringing Down The House]]'' ({{ISBN|0-7432-4999-2}}), which describes how MIT students used it with great success. See also the Canadian movie ''[[The Last Casino]]'' and the American movie ''[[21 (2008 film)|21]]'', which was based on Mezrich's book.

The publication of Ken Uston's books and of his landmark lawsuits against the casinos, both stimulated the growth of blackjack teams (Hyland's team and the first MIT team were formed in Atlantic City shortly after the publication of ''Million Dollar Blackjack'') and increased casino awareness of the methods of blackjack teams, making it more difficult for such teams to operate. Hyland and Francesco soon switched to a form of shuffle tracking called "Ace sequencing". Also referred to as "cutting to the Ace", this technique involves various methods designed to spot the bottom card during a shuffle (ideally an Ace) and expertly cut the deck and play future hands to force the player to receive the Ace. This made it more difficult for casinos to detect when team members were playing with an advantage. In 1994, members of the Hyland team were arrested for ace sequencing and blackjack team play at [[Casino Windsor]] in [[Windsor, Ontario]], Canada. It was documented in court that Nevada casinos with ownership stakes in the Windsor casino were instrumental in the decision to prosecute team members on cheating charges. However, the [[judge]] ruled that the players' conduct was not cheating, but merely the use of intelligent strategy.<ref name="blackjack20062">Snyder (2006)</ref>