Lawrence Revere

Lawrence Revere

Lawrence Revere was both an author and a serious player. He died in 1977. His only book, Playing Blackjack as a Business, initially published in 1969, is still in print. If you ever look at the “true count” methods being employed pre-Revere, you will understand why Revere was inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame.

The card-counting methods in use prior to Revere’s book were cumbersome and mentally fatiguing. In the second edition of Beat the Dealer, in which Thorp first proposed the Hi-Lo Count, he mentioned a simplified method of using the count, though he never developed it as a full system. Revere had a leap of brilliance that led him to come to the conclusion that the simplified method of obtaining a “true count” that Thorp had mentioned could be fully developed and employed with the most powerful of point count systems.

Revere hired Julian Braun, the man who did the computer work for the second (1966) edition of Thorp’s book to devise strategy tables for various point count system Revere had devised. The Revere Point Count soon became the system of choice among many of the top professional players.

Revere’s method was so simple compared to the alternatives, that it has been employed by virtually every serious balanced point count system developer since, including Stanford Wong, Ken Uston, Lance Humble, and Arnold Snyder. As a serious player, Revere’s knowledge of the game included such esoteric techniques as shuffle-tracking and hole card play.

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