Ken Uston's Professional Blackjack

Seven, seven, seven. I draw another card, the computer looks like someone just lost their mortgage. Ken Uston's Professional Blackjack from 1982 is one of the few attempts to offer a 'serious' version of casino blackjack on home computer — with statistical tables and basic strategy including tips on how to play situations where an average person would throw dice at the ceiling.

You work with a standard 52-card deck, casino rules and betting; goal is to beat the dealer without going over twenty-one. The game also tries to be a textbook — it offers instruction in proper strategy and a chance to try it in practice. It's about learning to count cards (or at least understanding why it's done) and play mathematically correctly, not just guess.

Controls are textual, terse and precise like letter writing. You pick your bet, get cards, then decide — hit, stand, double down, split. There's no graphics here. No animation, no sound, basically nothing. Just numbers on a black background. That could be overlooked if the game at least fulfilled the aim — but the sense of 'professional' blackjack gets lost when the computer plays the dealer so mechanically that nothing comes from it that you couldn't learn from a paper table. Repetition without tension, without story, without reason you'd want to remember it.

Does that mean the game is useless? No. Every era had different useful software. In early eighties it was an educational utility — something between a textbook and entertainment. It aged poorly mainly because that 'entertainment' was admittedly minimal even then. Playability was never a priority here.

Today you play it online more from historical curiosity — you want to see what blackjack looked like when a monitor was really just a monitor. It's not a game that would thrill you even in the spirit of nostalgia. It's an artifact. Did it preserve casino rules? Yes. That's enough for respect, but nothing more.