My blackjack. My wins. My way.

One such game is a French gambling game called quinze, which means “fifteen.”
This game appeared sometime in the sixteenth century, and was popular in European casinos up until the mid-eighteen hundreds.
Here’s how quinze was played:
As a casino game, quinze was not house-banked, but was banked by the player who dealt the cards. The house merely took a percentage of the dealer’s win. All players bet against the dealer/banker, and bets had to be placed prior to the deal. A standard fifty-two-card deck was used, with each card counting as its face value. Aces counted as one, and all court cards counted as ten. The deck was shuffled, and each player and the dealer were dealt one card face down. Players had to play their hands before the dealer played his. Each player in turn had the option to hit or stand, and any number of hits was permitted. If the player achieved a total of exactly 15, he immediately turned up his cards, and provided the dealer did not also make a total of 15, the player would be paid off at 2 to 1 on his bet. If both the player and the dealer made 15, the hand was a push. The only exception was that a two-card 15, a natural 15, would beat a 15 total comprised of more than two cards.

Gambling scholars have argued for decades about the origins of many modem gambling games. When it comes to the game of blackjack, the most popular house­banked card game in history, many modem texts tell us that the origins of the game are “uncertain.” Hey, just about everything in this universe is uncertain, but the origins of blackjack are not. The game can be traced to a number of popular European card games from as far back as the fifteenth century. That’s right around the time when Gutenberg invented the printing press, and cards themselves became popular (and cheap) enough to play games with. Prior to that, cards were hand-painted by artists and calligraphers for royalty only, and they were primarily used for religious, educational, or ceremonial purposes.

Virtually all card games are based on some specified number of cards being dealt, with a winner determined by some happenstance of rank, suit, match, sequence, or total. In the simple children’s game of war-which in recent years has been modified into a house-banked casino games-the only determining factor of the winner is rank. In more complex card games, like poker, various combinations of rank, suit, match, or sequence may decide the winner. Blackjack is more complex than war, but much simpler than poker. The winner at twenty-one is decided almost entirely on the basis of total, with the cards’ numerical values being added together.