Arnold Snyder
2002
A former professional player and author and editor of Blackjack Forum quarterly. He revolutionized the ways professional card counters attacked the game.
Arnold Snyder
Arnold Snyder was a professional blackjack player who has been writing about casino blackjack for over 30 years. His first book, The Blackjack Formula (1980), revolutionized the ways professional card counters attacked the games by pointing out, for the first time, the relative importance of deck penetration (over rules or counting system) to a card counter’s win rate.
His discovery has since been borne out by numerous independent computer simulations. In fact, it’s become bedrock knowledge among card counters today that penetration is the name of the game, and many find it hard to believe that for the first two decades of card counting, players did not know this.
Snyder also went against the grain in the early 1980s by recommending that players start using highly simplified sets of strategy indices based on data from Peter Griffin’s analyses. Snyder also developed and published (in Blackjack for Profit) the first unbalanced point count system.
In his 2003 The Blackjack Shuffle Tracker’s Cookbook (Huntington Press), Snyder provided the first numbers available on the edges that can be gained from different approaches to shuffle tracking.
Since 1981, Snyder has been the publisher and editor of Blackjack Forum, a quarterly journal for professional gamblers (now published online).
Snyder was also the author of Blackbelt in Blackjack and other works directed at serious players who are new to playing blackjack at a professional level.
Arnold Snyder died on June 6, 2023.
| In honor of Arnold Snyder, who passed away in 2023, several test questions were presented at the 2023 (26th) Blackjack Ball. Here they are:
Number 1: True or False? Arnold Snyder’s “Give Greed a Chance” Sermon was filmed OVER 100 days BEFORE Wall Street and the “Greed is Good” speech premiered. Number 2: Which of these is NOT TRUE About Arnold?
Number 3 Arnold Published This “Deep Penetration Technique” that Relied on “Card Eaters” Depleting Single Deck Games ANSWERS BELOW VIEW Number 1: True Number 2: #1. He didn’t Shuffle Track in the South. Regarding #6, the store’s been empty for decades but was still there in 2023. Number 3: Depth Charging |
