Uston Strategies for CV

[Norm]

As many of you know, it has always been my policy to not include strategies in my software without authorization. I have authorization from Snyder, Carlson, Colin Jones, Dravot, Renzey, George C., Humble, Shackleford, Vancura & Curtis, Ralph Striker, Wong, and myself. But authorization for Uston strats has eluded me for 30 years. For a time, I had permission from Uston’s publisher to include them in a separate bit of software named Uston Verite. But he never managed to distribute it. He died and the copyright went to a website that died and went to another that died and then was lost. A few months ago I found the new copyright holder. I signed a contract with them and have now included Uston Simple +/-, Uston Advanced +/- and Uston APC in CVBJ, CVCX, and CVData. For CVCX/CVData V6, click the Install New Release button on the main page. For CVBJ, install the update at https://qfit.com/downloads.htm#free. There is no fee.

Now, anybody seen Revere lately?

[iCountNTrack]

Wasn't he your mentor?

[Norm]

Revere got me off to the right start. Fortunately not Uston as I may have ended up with a powdery nose.

Revere went through a bunch of publishers including the publisher of some nasty stuff, like The Anarchist's Cookbook. One of his publishers had an office across the street from my office in Manhattan decades ago. (Same building as Bernie Madoff.) But no one was ever there. Revere's family did not know who held the copyright. I did track it down recently. But, they wanted money and don't even hold the copyright for multi-deck strategies.

[iCountNTrack]

I heard that Uston was the better player, obviously they both had ridiculously complicated counts. This is an interesting copyright question, would using the same counting tags and generating the indices on your own and using a totally different name for the counting system considered a violation?

[Norm]

Tags cannot be copyrighted. Too simple. I had a discussion with Uston's publisher ages ago. He claimed Uston APC to be copyrighted but also told me it couldn't be because it was algorithmic. This isn't actually true as there are so many decisions you make when you customize a strategy for the balance of ease of use, power, and games. Besides, it is not purely algorithmic as in the typical example of logarithm tables. A strategy has a lot of art in addition to science.