Blackjack, computer expert Braun dies

Friday, May 18, 2001 | 9:26 a.m.

Julian Howard Braun came to Las Vegas in the 1950s to teach mathematics at Las Vegas High School by day and deal blackjack at the Hacienda hotel at night.

He parlayed his love of mathematics and blackjack into a winning formula for the game that has benefited players over the last 35 years. Braun, however, shied away from playing the game and gained little financially from his calculations.

Late in life, the longtime computer programmer became a recluse. When he died Sept. 4 at age 70 in in his native Chicago, Braun's passing received little notice.

Las Vegas gaming experts Peter Ruchman and Howard Schwartz tracked down distant relatives and friends through e-mails and records, turning up a death certificate.

"He was a forgotten man," said Schwartz, marketing director at the Gamblers Book Shop. "Yet Julian was very important for triggering the popularity of the game in the 1960s, when his calculations proved the player has a good chance to win at blackjack.

"He is referred to in nearly every blackjack book of importance because he did pioneering and revolutionary work."

Braun, who long worked as a programmer for IBM in Chicago, where he first developed his winning formula, is remembered in the current issue of Blackjack Confidential Magazine.

"Julian was a very complex individual -- by today's standards, a computer geek -- and he was a loner," said Ruchman, general manager of the Gamblers Book Shop. "He was very passionate about the use of artificial intelligence, and he saw how it could be used in gambling, though he was not a gambler.

"In his final days, he was somewhat bitter that he not only never made significant money for his work, but also because he never got the credit he felt he deserved. So he went into seclusion."

After leaving Las Vegas, Braun returned to Chicago to work in IBM's downtown research laboratory. There Braun used IBM's 704 mainframe -- one of the fastest computers of its time -- to calculate blackjack odds and quantify Edward Thorp's controversial yet influential 1962 book, "Beat the Dealer."

It took Braun weeks of painstaking work on the bulky punch card-style computer to prove Thorp's high-low counting system, a basic strategy used to this day by the world's top players.

Braun's calculations were used in other key blackjack publications, including "Blackjack as a Business" by Lawrence Revere in 1969.

But Braun waited until 1980 to publish his own book, "How to Play Winning Blackjack." That out-of-print paperback today retails for $100 a copy -- if one can be found, Schwartz said, noting that the Gamblers Book Shop has one, and it's not for sale.

Born Sept. 25, 1929, Braun was one of two children of Marcel Braun and the former Anne Levin.

Braun earned degrees in math and physics and a master's degree in science.

After Braun retired from IBM in the late 1980s, he worked out of his home as a commodities trader. He also was an avid stamp collector and a chess player.

He leaves no survivors.