Keith Taft - Blackjack Hall Of Fame

Keith Taft

Keith Taft is not well known to the general public, but professional blackjack players know him as an electronics genius who has spent more than thirty years devising high-tech equipment-computers, video cameras, and communication devices - to beat the casinos. Blackjack was his initial and prime target. His first blackjack computer, which he completed in 1972, weighed fifteen pounds. Over the years, as computer chip technology developed, his computers became smaller, faster, lighter and much more effective. By the mid-1970s, he had a device that weighed only a few ounces that could play perfect strategy based on the exact cards remaining to be dealt.

His son Marty’s name would be right along his in the Blackjack Hall of Fame, as the two have worked as a good partners since Marty was a teenager. For thirty years they have jointly created ever-more-clever hidden devices to beat the casinos, trained teams of players in their use, and have personally gone into the casinos to get the money. Keith and Marty may, in fact, have literally invented the concept of computer “networking,” as they were wiring computer-equipped players together at casino blackjack tables thirty years ago in their efforts to beat the games.

When Nevada had forbidden devices in 1985, it was result of a Taft device found on Keith’s brother, Ted - a miniature video camera built into Ted’s belt buckle that could relay an image of the dealer’s hole card as it was being dealt to a satellite receiving dish mounted in a pickup truck in the parking lot, where an accomplice read the video image, then transferred Ted at the table the information he needed. An in-depth interview with Keith and Marty Taft was published in the Winter 2003-04 Blackjack Forum, and is available online.

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Blackjack Hall of Fame - Tommy Hyland

Tommy Hyland

Tommy started his blackjack career in 1978 while still in college. That was also the year he formed his first informal “team.” He’s never looked back. For more than twenty-five years, he has been running the longest-lasting and most successful blackjack team in the history of the game. He and his friends have played in casinos all over the world. He has used big player techniques, concealed computers, and had one of the most successful “ace location” teams ever. He has personally been barred, back-roomed, hand-cuffed, arrested, and even threatened with murder at gun-point by a casino owner he had beaten at the tables. Every year, the Hyland team players take millions of dollars out of the casinos. And even though Tommy has had his name and photo published in the notorious Griffin books more times than any other player in history of blackjack, he continues to play and beat the games wherever legal blackjack games are offered. He has also fought for players’ rights by battling the casinos in the courts.

Despite his frightening reputation, Tommy is very polite, and always is a gentleman. He is as loved by players as he is hated by the casinos. In an interview conducted by Richard Munchkin in 2001, Tommy said, “If someone casino told me I could make $10 million a year working for it, I wouldn’t even consider it. It wouldn’t take me five minutes to turn it down … I don’t like casinos at all. I don’t like how they ruin people’s lives. I don’t suppose the employment they provide is a worthwhile thing for those people. They’re taking people that could be contributing to society and making them do a job that has no redeeming social value.”

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