Ben Affleck is almost as famous for his gambling skills as he is for his acting and directing of movies and this week, he made the news again because of his gambling. Apparently he?s been banned from playing blackjack for life at the Hard Rock Vegas because he was caught counting cards.

The security team at the Hard Rock allegedly caught the card-counting incident on the security cameras and Affleck was not permitted to continue playing blackjack. However, the casino has invited him to play other games there.

It’s the latest in a long line of card-counting incidents. While the ability to count the cards during a game of blackjack isn’t actually illegal, it obviously works against the casinos? main goal of making money rather than handing it out to players. So since card counting as a phenomenon has been known about, the casinos have always worked to keep an eye on the players and make sure that they nip any card counting in the bud by asking players to stop the game or leave the casino.

Most people playing blackjack today aren’t in the position to do any card counting. When you play at the 32 Red online casino or another online site, card counting is not a possibility. The cards that you are dealt are managed by random number generator software, so card counting just doesn’t work.

But where did the idea of counting cards come from? The father of card counting was actually an MIT professor, Edward Thorp, who devised a theory about the probabilities of winning blackjack back in the 1960s using an IBM 704computer. Thorp was confident that players could win by counting the cards in the deck during a game. He also used the computer to devise different card-counting theories to improve his chances of winning. Having looked at the idea in principle, Thorp took a road trip with an associate called Manny Kimmel to different casinos in Las Vegas and Reno. Kimmel was a former bookie and wealthy gambler with connections to the mob. According to Thorp’s book, , they used card-counting in their trial weekend to make $11,000, but their winning spree was interrupted frequently by casino security teams spotting how well they were doing and asking them to leave. They then moved on to different casinos.

Thorp’s book made it to the top of the New York Times best seller list selling over 700,000 copies. The book’s success probably meant that card counters had to go to greater lengths to avoid being spotted by casino security and ejected from the premises. The most well-known group of card counters is the original MIT blackjack team, a group of talented MIT students who allegedly cleared $400,000 in their first weekend of counting cards in the 1980s, having gone through hours of practice in their dorm rooms.

While the majority of blackjack players are online today and can’t count cards, clearly the news about Ben Affleck’s ban tells us it’s still something that still goes on in the land-based casinos.