Al Francesco

Al is one of the most highly respected blackjack players in the history of the game. This is the guy who literally invented team play at blackjack and taught Ken Uston how to count cards. Ken once said to me, “I owe everything to Al, Arnold. He really might be the greatest blackjack player there ever was, and he’s also a real gentleman.”

Al is primarily known to the general public through Ken Uston’s books as the mas¬termind who created the big player (BP) team concept. Al started his first blackjack team in the early 1970s, and until Uston’s first book, The Big Player, was published in 1977, Al’s teams were completely invisible to the casinos and extracted millions of dollars from them.

Virtually all of the most successful blackjack teams that came after The Big Player was published—the Hyland team, the MIT team, the Czech team, the Greeks—used Al’s BP concept to disguise their attacks, and that approach is still being employed profitably by teams today.

Professional players know Al for his highly inventive approaches to beating the casinos, though all of his methods cannot be written about because they are still in use by players. An in-depth interview with Al Francesco appeared in the Summer 2002 issue of Blackjack Forum and can be found in the BlackjackForumOnline.com Library.

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