Twenty-one, formerly known as vingt-un in Britain, France and America, is the name given to a family of popular card games of the gambling family, the progenitor of which is recorded in Spain in the early 17th century. The family includes the casino games of blackjack and pontoon as well as their domestic equivalents. Twenty-one rose to prominence in France in the 18th century and spread from there to Germany and Britain from whence it crossed to America. Known initially as vingt-un in all those countries, it developed into pontoon in Britain after the First World War and blackjack in Canada and the United States in the late 19th century, where the legalisation of gambling increased its popularity.
History
Spanish origins
The game is first mentioned by name in a 1611 Spanish dictionary where, under the entry for "card" (carta), it mentions the game of ventiuno ("twenty-one"). Just two years later, the first brief description of the game is given in a novella by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes, 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 veintiuna (sic), and state that the object of the game is to reach 21 points without going over and that the ace scores 1 or 11. The game is played with the Spanish baraja deck. This short story was written between 1601 and 1602, implying that ventiuna had been played in Castile since the beginning of the 17th century or earlier.
France
The first record of the game in France occurs in 1768 in the Mercure de France, which describes vingt-un as fashionable, but "very old", referring to Cervantes' novella. Other early accounts indicate that the game was new to France suggesting that it took root there from the mid-18th century. It was also played at the court of Louis XV and is reputed to have been the favourite card game of Napoleon, but no French rules appear until 1817, nearly two decades after their publication in England. The game continues to appear in French compendia as vingt-un and, later, vingt-et-un until the late 19th century, but appears obsolete today.
Britain
In Britain, the game is also recorded in the 1770s and 1780s, for example in a comedy entitled Dissipation, but the first rules appear in the 1800 edition of Hoyle's under the name of vingt-un. The rules, which are rather simple, are reprinted almost verbatim for the next half a century, but in 1850, more elaborate rules are described which are beginning to look like pontoon in all but name.
Germany
Known in the German-speaking world as Siebzehn und Vier ("seventeen and four"), Einundzwanzig ("twenty-one"), Hop(p)sen, Hoppm, Rathen or, frequently, by its original French names of vingt-un or vingt-et-un, the game had spread to Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire there by the second half of the 18th century, and had become a universally common game of chance by 1854. It has continued to be popular as a children's and family game through to modern times.
North America
There is a popular myth that, when vingt-un was introduced into the United States in the early 1800s – other sources say during the First World War and still others the 1930s – gambling houses offered bonus payouts to stimulate players' interest. One such bonus was a ten-to-one payout if the player's hand consisted of the ace of spades and a black jack (either the jack of clubs or the jack of spades). This hand was called a "blackjack", and it is claimed that the name stuck to the game even though the ten-to-one bonus was soon withdrawn. French card historian Thierry Depaulis has recently debunked this story, showing that the name blackjack was first given to the game by prospectors during the Klondike Gold Rush (1896–99), the bonus being the usual ace and any 10-point card. Since the term "blackjack" also refers to the mineral zincblende, which was often associated with gold or silver deposits, he suggests that the name was transferred by prospectors to the top bonus in the game. He was unable to find any historical evidence for a special bonus for having the combination of an ace with a black jack.