Every card counter quickly learns about the dreaded Griffin books. Initially, it was just a single book. Now, in its fifth “volume,” the Griffin books are a virtual library of photos and information about professional casino gamblers. In fact, the mug books of card counters’ photos that are published by Griffn Investigations in Las Vegas have become so well known among professional blackjack players that they often don’t even use the proper name when referring to them. One counter might ask another, “Are you in the book?” And the other will immediately know what he’s talking about.

The book.

An annoyance for every advantage player.

To be fair, it’s not all card counters’ photos. There are some actual cheaters and thieves, purse-snatchers, and slot machine “sluggers” in the Griffin books. But it’s more card counters than any other category, and for a good reason. There just aren’t very many real crooks in the casinos. And casinos aren’t scared of purse-snatchers. The security guards will take care of them. The casinos fear the players who can blend into the crowd and legally take money from their gaming tables simply by playing with intelligence.

Intelligence is not a trait any casino is looking for in its customers. And the Griffin books are essentially mug books of the intelligent players, the customers the casinos definitely do not want playing their games.

But where did “the books” come from? How did the concept originate? Most counters today have no idea. It seems the Griffin books have been around for as long as card counting itself.

Well, almost. . .

The timing of their arrival was perfect.

It was 1967 when a young Las Vegas private detective, Robert Griffin, first got the idea for the books that have plagued card counters now for almost thirty years. Ed Thorp’s Beat the Dealer had just gone into its second (1966) edition, and the casinos were frantic to find an answer to the growing problem of getting rid of this new crop of professional players.

They had tried changing the rules of blackjack in 1963, but it didn’t work. Their main consultant, John Scarne, was valiantly trying to convince the public that Thorp’s system was a fake and that card counting didn’t work, but the public wasn’t buying it. In fact, it was ruining Scarne’s reputation as a player advocate, which he clearly no longer was.

So, throughout 1964 and 1965, Scarne began advising the Las Vegas casinos to stop dealing single-deck games and start dealing blackjack from four-deck shoes, which he believed would be far more difficult for card counters to keep track of. At the same time, Scarne was warning players that the single-deck blackjack games were too “dangerous” for players because skilled card mechanics could cheat too easily in a hand-held game.

Many of the Las Vegas casinos did, in fact, switch from single-deck games to four-deck shoes. And it was nearly impossible for any player to use Thorp’s ten-count in a shoe game. But when Thorp’s 1966 edition of Beat the Dealer came out, with the new Hi-Lo counting system that could be used to count cards with any number of deck, the casinos knew they were in trouble. Thorp was not letting up-more and morel books and counting systems were being sold, and John Scarne had no solution.