How Atlantic City became top gambling destination
Resorts International opened in Atlantic City in 1978 and was the first legal East Coast casino in the twentieth century. Their four- and six-deck blackjack games offered a new form of surrender, dubbed by card counters as “early surrender,” since the casino allowed players to surrender half a bet even when the dealer showed an ace or 10 up, and before the dealer checked for a blackjack. Ironically, as word spread through the gambling community that card counters found the Resorts’ blackjack game to be the most lucrative game for players in the country, gamblers from all over the world - most of whom knew nothing about basic strategy or card counting - flocked to their tables.
A team of professional blackjack players whose founders were from Czechoslovakia that had been playing in Las Vegas flew all of their members to Atlantic City to take advantage of this new surrender rule. This team, which later became known in the casino industry as simply the Czech Team, found the Resorts’ game to their liking and stayed for months.
In fact, it was a combination of that easy-to-beat early surrender game and Ken Uston’s The Big Player that had just been published in 1977 that worked together to create an environment where new teams of smart young kids could make millions playing blackjack.
A New Jersey college student named Tommy Hyland, who had just turned twenty-one, started going to Atlantic City in 1978 when he heard about the favorable black-jack game at Resorts. Within a year, he had organized about twenty of his college and golfing buddies into a team of blackjack players. Hyland’s team continues to this day as one of the most successful casino gambling operations in history.