Shoe (cards) must be dealt from a shoe (Scarne's invention). While no such ruling was ever passed, most Nevada casinos now deal from a multi-deck shoe. As gaming advisor to the Havana Hilton, Scarne also introduced the shoe to Puerto Rico and Cuba. The device is so named because the earliest versions of it resembled a woman's high-heel shoe, and were often painted red or black in color. Dealing shoes come in many colors and sizes, depending on the number of decks they are capable of holding (2, 4, 6, or 8 decks). When the cards are placed in the shoe, the
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (blackjack) Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (blackjack) Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is the name given by gambling authors to the four U.S. Army engineers who first discovered in the 1950s the best playing strategy in the casino game of Blackjack that can be formulated on the basis of the player's and the dealer's cards. The so-called Basic Strategy, which was subsequently refined through the use of computers and combinatorial analysis, loses the least money to the casino in the long term. In 1953, Roger Baldwin, a private in the U.S. Army with a master's degree in Mathematics from Columbia University,