Ken Uston

History Uston was born Kenneth Senzo Usui in New York City, the oldest of three children born to Elsie Lubitz, a native of Austria and Senzo Usui, a Japanese immigrant and businessman. At the age of 16, Uston was accepted to and henceforth began attending Yale University, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Shortly after graduating from Yale, he earned an MBA from Harvard University. He became district manager of the Southern New England Telephone Co., then a senior management consultant with Cresap, McCormick & Paget in San Francisco, where he relocated with his wife and two daughters. After several years in consulting, he became corporate planning manager for American Cement in Los Angeles before returning to San Francisco where he became a Senior Vice-President at the Pacific Stock Exchange. On weekends, beginning in his years at Cresap, he read Thorp's 1964 book Beat the Dealer and began to spend time in the casinos, becoming what the Cleveland Plain Dealer called "a genius card-counter". Uston related that he became fascinated by blackjack and its inherent strategies after meeting professional gambler Al Francesco in a poker game. Francesco had recently launched the first "big player" type of blackjack card counting team, and he recruited Uston to be one of his main team players. Their system was that members of the team would play at different tables around a casino, counting cards. When a count became extremely positive, they would flag the "big player" member of the team who would come in and place large bets. This technique would prevent the increased bet spread from being noticed by the pit bosses. On his first five-day run, the team won $44,100, of which Uston's share was $2,100. After he was barred in January 1979 by Resorts International, he filed a lawsuit, claiming that casinos did not have the right to bar skilled players. In Uston v. Resorts International Hotel Inc., 445 A.2d 370 (N.J. 1982), the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that Atlantic City casinos did not have the authority to decide whether card counters could be barred absent a valid New Jersey Casino Commission regulation excluding card counters. To date, New Jersey casinos—by statute—are not allowed to bar them. In response to Uston's legal victory, Atlantic City casinos began adding decks, moving up shuffle points, and taking other measures to decrease a skilled player's potential advantage. Uston revealed he got hooked on the games Pong and then Breakout. In 1979 Space Invaders became his video game of choice and, after his blackjack team made $350,000 in Atlantic City, they rented a house in California and bought a Space Invaders machine. The game appealed to him in part because of the trick of counting one's shots to get the maximum number of points for the spaceship at the top of the screen.

In 1981, Uston began frequenting the Easy Street Pub near the Playboy Casino in Atlantic City. It was there he began a competition with some other regulars for having the high score on the bar's Pac-Man arcade game. He realized the game had patterns and, in order to gain an advantage, he began experimenting and writing them down on diagrams of the maze he had created, but he was unable to go beyond a certain level. On a trip back to San Francisco, he came across two Chinese-American boys by the names of "Tommy" and "Raymond" who taught him how to go further in the game. People had been telling Uston he should write a book about Pac-Man, but he had felt he didn't have enough knowledge. After receiving lessons from the two boys, Uston decided to go ahead with the book, titled Mastering Pac-Man, and wrote it in four days. It appeared in the New York Times Best Seller list.

Uston wrote several more books about video games and home computers during the 1980s. He also licensed his name to Coleco for the ColecoVision game Ken Uston's Blackjack/Poker. In 1983, Screenplay published software titled for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, Commodore 64, and IBM PC to assist in the learning and practice of Uston's relatively complex, yet highly accurate card-counting techniques.

He was also credited with the idea for the 1984 game Puzzle Panic.

Personal life Uston was married three times; all of his marriages ended in divorce. He had three children, Beth Anne, Kathleen (Katie), and John. Katie Uston became a state court judge in Alexandria, Virginia.

Death On the morning of September 19, 1987, Uston, age 52, was found dead in his rented apartment in Paris. The cause of death was listed as heart failure.