Whether you’re a seasoned online poker player or an old hand at the blackjack table, you’ve probably spent a lot of time trying to work out what the odds are of winning at blackjack and ways to get the better of the dealer and beat the house without cheating. 

The truth is, you’re not alone in this pursuit. In fact, you’re in some pretty smart company. Remember the famous tale of a group of MIT students who worked out how to operate as a team to count cards and outsmart dealers at a slew of casinos around the world? Their exploits were immortalized in the book “Bringing Down The House” and stood as the inspiration for the 2008 Hollywood blockbuster “21” starring Kevin Spacey. 

More recently, however, a team of physicists from MIT and Caltech took it way further when they considered using the weird notion of quantum entanglement to beat the dealer at blackjack. What follows is a brief description of quantum entanglement, what the physicists found out and whether you can use their findings to win at blackjack.

What is quantum entanglement?

The term quantum entanglement sounds more science fiction than science fact, which leads many of us lay people to ask, “what is it?” and “is quantum entanglement real?”

The simplest way to explain it is to think of a pair of twins. They are born at the same time, look exactly the same and, if separated at birth, can exist at vast distances from each other as they grow up. 

Yet, there is a bond that connects them which can result in them exhibiting similar behaviors even when they are not directly in communication or even unaware of their sibling’s existence.

In quantum entanglement, the “twins” represent two “bonded” particles that display exactly the same behaviors at exactly the same time regardless of the distance between them. 

This “bond” is not easily explained through our current laws of physics. Albert Einstein, who is regarded as the father of modern physics, called this correlation between two “twin” particles a “spooky action at a distance” when he and his colleagues first observed this quantum relationship in the 1930s. 

Yet when he tested this idea against his own theories, he concluded that it would be impossible as, according to his own theory of relativity, two particles would need to communicate faster than the speed of light for their behaviors to be linked.

Nearly 30 years later, however, physicist John Bell proved theoretically that quantum entanglement is indeed real and even created a test for scientists to determine if separated particles are in fact, entangled.

Fast forward another 50 years and many experiments have been conducted by numerous teams positively proving Bell’s theory of quantum entanglement. 

The quantum blackjack experiment

A more-recent experiment started almost whimsically when, after a night of poker,  MIT physicist Joseph Formaggio proposed the idea of quantum blackjack to his colleagues Joseph Lin, Aram Harrow and Caltech’s Anand Natarajan. 

“One motivation for this work was as a concrete realization of the Bell test,” said Harrow of the experiment. “People wrote the rules of blackjack not thinking of entanglement. But the players are dealt cards, and there are some correlations between the cards they get. So does entanglement work here? The answer to the question was not obvious going into it.”

The experiment assumed a simple blackjack configuration of a dealer and two players called Bob and Alice who were colluding to beat the dealer. The paper, published by the MIT and Caltech team, tested three scenarios to compare whether applying quantum entanglement theory to blackjack would give the players a bigger advantage than simply showing each other their cards or counting the cards in the deck. 

The mathematical model used in the experiment essentially allowed both players to “press” a button on a virtual box based on the unexposed card that was dealt. So if Bob’s face-down card is a 7, he would “push” the corresponding button on his quantum “box” and it would suggest whether he should stand or hit based on the calculations. 

After running thousands of hands in a simulation, it became clear that using quantum entanglement gave the players a  very small, but distinct,  advantage. It also noted that with more cards in the deck, the accuracy of the system was severely limited and only really came into its own once the dealer had fewer cards to deal out. 

Can you use quantum entanglement now?

Apart from the novelty of applying quantum mechanics to a live dealer casino game, it was clear that playing quantum blackjack was not immediately viable as a strategy. 

“It would require a very large investor, and my guess is, carrying a quantum computer in your backpack will probably tip the house,” explains Formaggio. “We think casinos are safe right now from this particular threat.” 

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