I also spoke to Edward Thorp. We corresponded and he was kind enough to supply crucial comments and information contained in this series. I don't believe in hunches.
Hunches are for dogs making love.
Their results were polished and made more precise by Thorp, who took their Basic Strategy calculations and refined them, making them more accurate leading to the basis for contemporary card counting. The correct version of the strategy for one deck and a certain set of casino rules appears in Chapter 3. It was calculated by Julian Braun. As Thorp has related, what Braun did was to combine his skills as a computer programmer par excellence with the higher speed, more powerful computers of IBM to utilize more precise calculations to arrive at better numbers and strategies. It took a Las Vegas cardsharp and hustler traveling under a variety of aliases, Griffith K. Owens, aka Leonard Parsons, aka Specs Parsons, aka Lawrence Revere, to refine Braun's calculations even further.