- published: 18 Jan 2011
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Blackjack, also known as Twenty-one or Vingt-et-un (French: "twenty-one"), is the most widely played casino banking game in the world. Blackjack is a comparing card game between a player and dealer and played with one or more French decks of 52 cards.
The player is dealt an initial two card hand with the option of drawing cards to bring the total value to 21 or less without exceeding it, so that the dealer will lose by having a lesser hand than the player or by exceeding 21. Many rule variations of blackjack exist. Since the 1960s, blackjack has been a high profile target of advantage players, particularly card counters, who track the profile of cards yet to be dealt, and adapt their wager and playing strategy accordingly.
Other casino games inspired by blackjack include Spanish 21 and pontoon. The recreational British card game of black jack is a shedding-type game and unrelated to the subject of this article.
Blackjack's precursor was twenty-one, a game of unknown origin. The first written reference is found in a book by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes, who is most famous for writing Don Quixote. Cervantes was a gambler, and the main characters of his tale Rinconete y Cortadillo, from Novelas Ejemplares, are a couple of cheats working in Seville. They are proficient at cheating at ventiuna (Spanish for twenty-one), and state that the object of the game is to reach 21 points without going over and that the ace values 1 or 11. The game is played with the Spanish baraja deck, which lacks eights, nines and tens. This short story was written between 1601 and 1602, implying that ventiuna was played in Castilla since the beginning of the 17th Century or earlier. Later references to this game are found in France and Spain.
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Keywords: behind-the-scenes, hong-kong, kung-fu, martial-arts, stuntwoman, title-directed-by-femaleActors: Victoria Snow (actress), Jason Blicker (actor), Byron A. Martin (miscellaneous crew), Nicholas Campbell (actor), Roddy Piper (actor), Peter R. Simpson (producer), Robin Dunne (actor), JR Bourne (actor), David Gow (actor), Michael A. Miranda (actor), Rachel Wilson (actress), Damon D'Oliveira (actor), Tommy Chang (actor), Torri Higginson (actress), Joel Gordon (actor),
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Plot: Jeff Coukous thought he had a nice, normal life, until he brought his fiance home to meet his mother. Then he learns the truth. The family is cursed. Seems one of his ancestors was a judge at the Salem witch trials and he made the mistake of burning a REAL witch. Now all the male progeny of the Coukos family are cursed with hereditary insanity.
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