July 6, 2026 · 5 min read · blackjack · history · technology

The man who beat blackjack with a computer in his shoe

In 1972, decades before anyone said the word smartwatch, a Baptist Sunday school teacher walked into a Reno casino wearing a fifteen-pound computer strapped to his body. He entered cards with switches taped to his toes and read the machine's advice from tiny lights hidden in the frames of his glasses. His name was Keith Taft, and he had built the whole thing himself.

What follows is one of the great garage-tinkerer stories of the 1970s: a family business of concealed computers, an FBI examination that went nowhere, teams run with the most famous card counter alive, and a punchline written by the Nevada legislature. Because the most lasting monument to Taft's genius is a law — the one that makes his kind of counting, and only his kind, a felony.

A physics degree and a $3.50 hand

Taft was an unlikely casino villain: degrees in physics and music, a master's in physics, an engineering job at Raytheon in Mountain View, and a devout churchgoing home life. On a 1969 family vacation stop in Reno he played a hand of blackjack, won about $3.50, and was hooked — not on gambling, but on the problem.

He read Edward Thorp's Beat the Dealer, the 1962 book proving blackjack could be beaten by tracking cards. Human counters use simplified systems because memory has limits. Taft, who worked with early microelectronics for a living, saw the next step: a machine could track the exact composition of the remaining deck and play nearly perfect strategy, no approximations and no fatigue. Hardware wasn't even a new idea — Thorp and Claude Shannon had built a cigarette-pack-sized roulette computer back in 1961 — but Taft would take it further than anyone.

George: fifteen pounds of blackjack computer

Two years of garage work later, in 1972, he finished a machine he named George. It was a personal computer built by one man, three years before the Altair 8800 put that idea into the world's vocabulary — just not a comfortable one:

Around fifteen pounds, worn strapped to the body under loose clothing
Input: four switches operated by his big toes, taped directly to his feet
Output: LED lights hidden in the upper rim of his eyeglasses
Power: batteries that, on at least one run, leaked acid onto their inventor mid-session

It worked — until the bankroll didn't

George played winning blackjack. Taft took him out on weekends and won twelve straight small-stakes sessions. Then he raised the stakes, ran into the wrong side of variance, and lost his entire $4,000 bankroll along with the earlier winnings. Discouraged, he shelved the machine for years — proof that even perfect strategy can't spare you from bankroll math.

Chips kept shrinking, though, and Taft kept building. In late 1976 he and his son Marty finished David: a Z80-based computer about the size of a deck of cards. Where George was a science experiment, David was a product — faster, lighter, easier to hide, and simple enough for other people to operate.

Ken Uston and the family business

Word reached Ken Uston, the ex-stock-exchange executive who ran the most famous blackjack teams of the era, and in 1977 Taft's computers went into team play. The results came fast: by the Tafts' own account, one $35,000 team bank was doubled in about two weeks, and a $50,000 bank doubled in roughly ten days.

The operation became a family affair. Keith, several of his children, and Marty's wife worked as inputters, keying every dealt card into concealed keyboards while radio signals carried the computer's decisions to receivers hidden in the big players' shoe heels. The Blackjack Hall of Fame credits the Tafts with linking machines at the tables into what may have been an early, improvised form of computer networking.

Then it nearly all ended at Harveys in Lake Tahoe, where security detained Marty mid-session and seized his device. The hardware was handed to the FBI for examination. Months passed — and then the anticlimax: no one was arraigned. The machine, after all, did nothing a player couldn't lawfully do; it computed from cards dealt face-up in public view. That was Keith's own reasoning from the start: the computer used exactly the same information available to any other player. In 1977, no law said otherwise.

Nevada writes a law about you

The later gadgets drifted somewhere darker. One device, found on Keith's brother Ted, was a miniature video camera built into a belt buckle that relayed an image of the dealer's hole card to a receiver in a truck outside, where a confederate read the card and signaled back. That isn't computing public information anymore; that's peering at hidden information — and by the Hall of Fame's account, that discovery is what finally moved Nevada to act.

In 1985 the legislature passed NRS 465.075, which makes it unlawful to use — or even possess with intent to use — any device, software, or hardware designed to track cards, analyze probabilities, or analyze betting strategy in a casino game. Under the companion penalty statute, a first offense is a category C felony, and repeats climb to category B with years of prison attached. Other gaming states followed with statutes of their own.

Notice the line the law drew, because it's the whole punchline of Taft's story. Counting with your brain stayed legal, as we've covered elsewhere on this blog. Nevada never criminalized the arithmetic; it criminalized the silicon. The same computation that's a felony in your shoe is perfectly lawful in your skull.

The shoes in the museum

Taft walked away from the casinos in the mid-1980s and was inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame in 2004, two years before his death in 2006. A pair of his computer shoes sits on permanent display in the Hall of Fame museum at Barona Casino near San Diego — enshrined alongside players who did it all in their heads.

And there's a practical lesson under the anecdote. Everything Taft automated — a running tally, a true-count conversion, a deviation from basic strategy — is what a trained human counter does with a simplified system. The machine's version was exact, and it became a felony. The human version is approximate, legal everywhere, and entirely learnable.

Fifty years on, the legal way to get the machine's edge is to become the machine: the same running count Taft wired into toe switches is a skill you can drill for free.

Build the count in your head →

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