The Remote Gambling Association (RGA), an association speaking for some of the largest British and European internet gambling operators, today blasted US authorities in light of the $300M settlement reached yesterday with togel online largest shareholder Anurag Dikshit.  Dikshit pleaded guilty to charges under the Wire Act stemming from PartyGaming’s operations in the US prior to passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA).  The RGA urged the European Commission to protect EU interests from what it calls, “WTO-violating retroactive and discriminatory enforcement by US authorities.”

“These events show that the outgoing US administration and the Department of Justice have shown a total disrespect for the legal rights of European online gaming companies and those associated with them and a complete disregard for US international commitments under GATS,” said Clive Hawkswood, Chief Executive of the RGA.

EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson wrote to the Bush Administration’s United States Trade Representative (USTR) in June 2008 requesting a freeze on all enforcement actions by the US authorities against European online gaming companies on the grounds that they violated international trade rules set by the World Trade Organization. Mandelson suggested that the prosecutions stop until a proper dialog could take place so as to avoid unnecessary escalation of the dispute at a time when the EU had already launched an inquiry into US actions following an RGA complaint made under EU Trade Barrier Regulations.

“Not only has that request remained unanswered, but now the US authorities, it seems, have succeeded in pressuring a major shareholder into making a deal. A major line has been crossed and it could set a very worrying precedent,” said Hawkswood.

“It’s amazing really that a company which has just been voted by the leading industry publication as ‘responsible operator of the year’ is the one that has been most targeted for this sort of enforcement activity,” Hawkswood continued. PartyGaming Plc never offered sports-betting to avoid violating US law and ceased accepting US customers for its poker and casino games when the still-controversial Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act 2006 was passed. “Other businesses that are still active in the US market, including notably US operators, do not appear to be targeted in the same way. That this happens while the US Internet gambling market, the biggest in the world, continues to grow and while US companies are free to develop their businesses in Europe, is quite astonishing. In the circumstances it is not unreasonable for us once again to seek the support and protection of the European Commission. We hope and believe that these continuing breaches of international law by the US will serve to strengthen the Commission’s resolve.”

The EU Commission started an investigation of the RGA’s complaint in March 2008. “The US has been given ample opportunity to respond to the legal and factual arguments presented in our complaint,” said Lode Van Den Hende of Herbert Smith, the RGA’s law firm in Brussels. “However, we understand the US’ defense has been flimsy and that the Commission will, therefore, have to confirm the RGA’s assessment of WTO unlawful, retroactive and discriminatory enforcement. The next question is what will be done about it, given the acceleration of events causing this dispute.”

Commenting on Dikshit’s guilty plea, Lode Van Den Hende explained, “What people need to understand here is that pleading guilty does not necessarily mean guilty. It is more than possible for the plea-bargaining system to act as an asymmetrical weapon in the hands of the prosecutors and one has to question whether that is happening here. If one looks at the fact that no court has yet applied the Wire Act to Internet gambling beyond sports-betting and that the activity ceased when UIGEA was passed, one has to wonder whether this is the right way for the US to go about making law – that will have wide repercussions, with regard to EU interests. According to opinion surveys among European companies from all sectors, one of the principal risks of doing business in the US is that politically motivated prosecutors can use criminal investigations as a form of regulation. These events demonstrate that this risk may be a very real one.”

Professor Joseph Weiler, who directs the Jean Monnet Centre for International and European Economic Law and Justice at NYU School of Law, also commented, “In this area, the US has lost all its cases and appeals before the WTO’s highest judicial authorities. And yet in what can only be described as puzzling and haughty contempt for the rule of law, it is acting as if it won those cases. The US is pursuing European nationals and corporations and threatening them with lengthy jail time and punitive fines based on US laws which have already been unequivocally held to be in violation of American WTO obligations. This is without precedent. It deals a blow to the multilateral trade system at the worst possible moment for the world economy and to Western economies which rely increasingly on services for our prosperity. It serves no discernible American national interest. This is a bad day for the reputation of the US in the area of international law.”

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History of Blackjack Advantage Systems Development, Part II – The Forgotten Man Of Blackjack, by Jerry Patterson

Harvey Dubner And The High-low Point Count System

It is interesting to speculate on what might have transpired if nothing more would have been done in the development of card counting systems following the 1962 publication of Thorp’s book. The game certainly would not have been as popular because of reasons noted in earlier articles and few, if any, additional blackjack books might have been published. Thorp and his cumbersome ten-count system probably would have been forgotten and you may never have heard of Lawrence Revere, Ken Uston, Lance Humble, Richard Canfield, or Jerry Patterson.

But additional work was done and it was performed by a man who has since become “the forgotten man of blackjack.” His name is Harvey Dubner and he invented the Point-count System – the system which led to scores of developmental projects, over 100 published blackjack books with the end not yet in sight, blackjack teams, concealed computers and shuffletracking.

Why isn’t Harvey Dubner recognized for his point-count system – a fantastic contribution to the world of blackjack? What is the impact of this early breakthrough on the current state of the art in blackjack card counting systems?

To find the answer to these two questions, we must start by moving forward one year after the first edition of Thorp’s book was published in 1962 – to the Fall Joint Computer Conference held in Las Vegas in 1963. On a whim, the conference organizers decided to include a Panel Session on “Using Computers in Slot Gacor Games of Chance and Skill.” Ed Thorp, author of the all-time best selling blackjack book, Beat The Dealer, was designated as Chairman of the Panel and experts on the various casino games, including blackjack, roulette and baccarat, were invited to speak, this author among them. You can guess who stole the show – Harvey Dubner with his description of his High/Low Point-count method.

To understand what I’m about to describe below, let me remind you that in Part 2 of the series (AP, March 2000), I described the problems associated with learning and using Thorp’s Ten Count System published in the first edition of his best selling book, Beat The Dealer.

I’ll never forget that session for as long as I live. Not realizing that most “computerniks” (as they were called at that time borrowing the suffix from the Russian Sputnik satellite) were also inveterate blackjack players, they scheduled the Panel Discussion in one of their smaller meeting rooms. The room filled up and overflowed 45 minutes before the session was scheduled to start! Hundreds of conference attendees were pushing and shoving to get into the room.

The crowd, of course, had been drawn by Thorp. They were expecting revelations on the game and anticipated using his imparted wisdom immediately following the session to make a killing at the blackjack tables. Thorp moderated the panel and introduced the speakers one by one.

Allen Wilson, who subsequently wrote The Casino Gamblers Guide, described his approach to finding biased roulette wheels and then presented an interesting graphic on the evolution of blackjack’s basic strategy. Beginning with the original strategy derived by Cantey, McDermott, Maisel and Baldwin, his graphic displayed the advantage the player achieved – beginning with slightly minus and increasing up to around 0.1 slightly positive as new studies were conducted by various groups and individuals between 1958 and 1963.

After one or two more presentations, Tony C. presented our findings resulting from the first blackjack computer simulation model I had programmed for the IBM 709 computer (see AP #2, March 2000 for a description). They were significant mainly because we had validated Thorp’s ten-count system with a totally different method than his mathematical formulation – playing it in over 500,000 simulated hands.

Then Dubner was introduced. After a short background discussion on how he had come to invent the point-count method leading to advantage blackjack, he described the approach. Dubner kept a count of remaining high cards (10,J,Q,K,A) and low cards (2,3,4,5,6) as the cards were played and divided its difference by total cards left to play. He called the result the High-Low Ratio and used this to size his bet.

His presentation was enthusiastically received by the standing room only crowd and he was given a round of applause at its conclusion. At the conclusion of the panel discussion, Dubner was mobbed by the crowd all wanting copies of his handout on the point-count system. Here at last, many were saying, is a system that is practical, that can actually be used in the real world of casino play.

This interesting historical background lays the groundwork for describing the impact of Dubner’s breakthrough on the evolution of the scores of point count system development projects that followed. They start with Thorp and Julian Braun and proceed right up to the new millennium with the publication of the latest blackjack book. Thorp incorporated Dubner’s system into the second edition of Beat the Dealer published in 1966 and offered some ideas for improvement. Did he have Dubner’s permission? He did acknowledge Dubner as its developer but, and this is my opinion, to justify including the system in his second edition and thus putting it in the public domain, he indicated that many of the readers of his book had also invented point-count systems. To prove this point he mentioned the publication of an ad in a Las Vegas newspaper offering a point-count system for $1,000.

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