The Blackjack Hall of Fame was launched in 2002, the creation of the community of professional blackjack players and advantage gamblers who had been meeting for years at the Blackjack Ball — an invitation-only gathering of serious players. The Hall operates by vote of the Ball's attendees, meaning that the people most qualified to evaluate blackjack mastery are the ones who determine who is enshrined. The first class of seven inductees included Edward O. Thorp, whose 1962 book Beat the Dealer was the first to demonstrate mathematically that card counting could give players an edge over the house, effectively launching the modern era of advantage play. Also included were Al Francesco, who developed the team play model that Thorp's theory enabled, and Stanford Wong, Peter Griffin, Arnold Snyder, Ken Uston, and Tommy Hyland.

In 2008, the Hall inducted a group collectively rather than individually — the Four Horsemen of Aberdeen: Roger R. Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel, and James McDermott. These were U.S. Army soldiers stationed at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in the early 1950s who, using mechanical calculators during off-hours, worked out the first mathematically accurate basic blackjack strategy. Their 1956 paper in the Journal of the American Statistical Association established that optimal play could reduce the house edge dramatically. Thorp built on their work; the entire edifice of advantage play descends from what four Army privates worked out on government-issue calculators in their spare time. The Hall honored them as a group because the contribution was collaborative.

The people in the Blackjack Hall of Fame share a common thread: they changed the game in ways that the casino industry had to adapt to. Thorp's mathematics proved counting was possible. Ken Uston organized team play and wrote about it publicly, then was banned from casinos across the country and sued Atlantic City for the right to play. Al Francesco invented the big player / counter team structure that became the template for groups like the MIT Blackjack Team. John Chang, who managed the MIT team, was inducted in 2007. Colin Jones, founder of the Church Team and advocate for teaching blackjack math openly, was the 2025 inductee. The Hall is a record of people who understood the game better than the people running it.

The decision to house the Blackjack Hall of Fame at Barona was made by the casino's management in 2002, when the Hall was launched. The comp arrangement — lifetime room, food, and beverage for every inductee, in exchange for never playing Barona's tables — was both a practical precaution and a kind of tribute: the casino acknowledging that the inductees are good enough to beat it, and choosing to honor that skill while protecting itself from it. The result is a casino that celebrates card counters and advantage players in a dedicated hall, displays their photographs and histories, and pays for their visits, while ensuring that their expertise never translates into actual losses at the felt. It is the most sophisticated arrangement in the history of an industry usually defined by its suspicion of talented players.