The Real MIT Blackjack Mastermind

Wade Roush writes "21, the top movie at the box office last weekend, has everyone talking about the real identities of the MIT blackjack team members fictionalized in the movie and in the 2002 book, Bringing Down the House, on which the film is based. Last week a number of stories pointed to former MIT student and Las Vegas resident John Chang as the model for the Micky Rosa character, the club mastermind played in the movie by Kevin Spacey. But Boston-area Internet entrepreneur and real estate developer Bill Kaplan is saying that if anyone is the basis for Micky Rosa, it's him. Turns out Kaplan now battles the "e-mail churn" problem as CEO of Newton, MA, startup FreshAddress, which helps companies correct the outdated e-mail addresses in their customer databases."

Comments

What kind of job is that?

[LostCluster]

Turns out Kaplan now battles the "e-mail churn" problem as CEO of Newton, MA, startup FreshAddress, which helps companies correct the outdated e-mail addresses in their customer databases."

Translation: Kaplan now helps marketers/spammers share your address so that when you associate your new address with your same other information, they can continue to market to/spam you.

Yeah, right, that's a job that's gonna get you a lot of respect here on /.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[houstonbofh]

From one scan to another... At least he is consistent.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[QuantumG]

I think you meant scam.

And counting cards is in no way scamming.

It's just playing the game the way a scientist should, not the typical "mystical" way that most people do.

Maybe in a hundred years "luck" will be an outmoded concept and gambling will been seen properly as "entertainment" but until then, most every idiot who goes to a casino is a mystical moron who thinks he's going to get lucky and win.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[Anonymous Coward]

But, but.. he went to MIT! He can't be evil!

Re:What kind of job is that?

[mattack2]

Exactly how is card counting a "scam"? They're using mathematics to beat the game, legitimately. One would think that Slashdot readers would appreciate that.

(Also, read "The Eudaemonic Pie", about a shoe device to predict roulette. That one is at least illegal.. though someone on wikipedia claimed that the publication of the book is what got the law passed.)

Re:What kind of job is that?

[STrinity]

Card counting isn't a scam, but some of the tricks they used to keep the house from twigging to what they were doing comes pretty close -- disguises, aliases, having lookouts stationed at different tables waiting for a hot deck, at which point they'd signal a team-mate to come over and law down the big bucks.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[bskin]

Card counting isn't a scam, but some of the tricks they used to keep the house from twigging to what they were doing comes pretty close -- disguises, aliases, having lookouts stationed at different tables waiting for a hot deck, at which point they'd signal a team-mate to come over and law down the big bucks.

No, it's really no more of a scam or criminal act than, say, encrypting your email. There's nothing wrong with obscuring what you're doing.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[_KiTA_]

Card counting isn't a scam, but some of the tricks they used to keep the house from twigging to what they were doing comes pretty close -- disguises, aliases, having lookouts stationed at different tables waiting for a hot deck, at which point they'd signal a team-mate to come over and law down the big bucks. None of that sounds overly disingenuous to me -- all of that sounds like standard teamwork and strategy. The casinos are just upset that someone is outsmarting them, and have enough money themselves to make an issue of it.

I see a remarkable parallel between them and the *AAs, actually. Both are large monolithic companies who make a rather large amount of money with archaic business practices and are reliant on their customers being ignorant. And both of them have epic class A freakouts when someone smart enough to see through them tries to outsmart them.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[Thugthrasher]

They only did that because the casinos want to make more money and so will throw people out who are playing the game in a way that improves their chances. They have the right to throw them out, but that's why they had to disguise themselves.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[ushering05401]

"And both of them have epic class A freakouts when someone smart enough to see through them tries to outsmart them."

Or tries to start online businesses that challenge their dominance. I was making bank in online poker tourneys for a while there... oh well.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[unlametheweak]

And counting cards is in no way scamming. A more accurate and ironic description would be "Gaming the system".

Re:What kind of job is that?

[QuantumG]

Ironic because "system" == "game"? In which case your descriptor is "Gaming the game", which is not only redundant, but also retarded as that's what you're supposed to do.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[cruelfood]

No, it's really no more of a scam or criminal act than, say, encrypting your email. There's nothing wrong with obscuring what you're doing.

Except that according to Bringing Down the House, they had been told not to come back to some of the casinos, and were using disguises to avoid being thrown out again. They were tresspassing, which is a criminal act.

But I agree that team blackjack play can't be considered a scam, especially the part about having spotters waiting for a hot deck. If the casino offers a game where the player has the advantage, a savvy player will take advantage of that. The casino can always change the rules of the game, or choose not to offer it.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[Erpo]

I see a remarkable parallel between them and the *AAs, actually. Both are large monolithic companies who make a rather large amount of money with archaic business practices and are reliant on their customers being ignorant.

I agree. Casinos and the *AAs would work much better if they were made up of distinct processes that communicated via message passing rather than function calls.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[sleigher]

Which I find interesting because they provide a don't pass bar on the craps table. This is basically the house bet, that you will not make your "point". It only pays one to one but has a higher percentage of winning than the roller getting the "point". Don't pass wins on 7 and 11.. loses on the point... pushes on 12. So they allow you to bet their bet which to me is gaming the game, but they don't let you count cards.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[Deadstick]

Much more accurate, and not at all ironic, would be "optimal play".

rj

Re:What kind of job is that?

[unlametheweak]

Ironic because "system" == "game"? The game in this case is the system, but more broadly it would be the Casino and it's practice of looking out for, and of banning card counters. These pros know it's a game (not just the Game of Blackjack), but a game of out-witting the house detectives. I don't see any redundancy here.

I will in fact "spell" it out to you. The irony lies in the term itself, and as it is applied here to card counters. The irony is also apparent in the fact that the casino's have already "gamed" the system against it's customers (from a profit perspective), especially considering that they can and will legally ban anybody whom they feel wins too much money.

The concept of "Gaming the system" is itself ironic (I hope I don't have to explain why):

Gaming the System means, simply, using the rules, policies and procedures of a system against itself for purposes outside what these rules were intended for. - http://www.wikitruth.info/index.php?title=Gaming_the_system

but also retarded as that's what you're supposed to do. Not according to the Casino's, because if they find you doing this they will ask you to leave. So that's why most people in Casino's don't do this, because they have already been banned or don't want to go through the effort.

And BTW, Blackjack is fun for most people; nothing really too mystical here for me when I play it (on rare occasions). Granted their are fools who may think otherwise and lose their lifesavings in turn.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[Deadstick]

gaming the game

It's no such thing. It's simply an offer to bet on an outcome that, just like all the other bets, has a negative expectation of gain. There are bets all over the table that can involve the shooter losing his pass bet: the "boxcars" bet, for example.

They don't let you count cards because, if you're good enough to do it right, it has a positive expectation of gain. If you do it poorly -- which you probably will, and they will know -- they'll treat you like a king.

Likewise the insurance bet in blackjack. If you take insurance, you're betting that everybody who doesn't have a blackjack will lose, and if the deck is not ten-heavy it's a losing bet.

rj

Re:What kind of job is that?

[nephridium]

Maybe in a hundred years "luck" will be an outmoded concept and gambling will been seen properly as "entertainment" but until then, most every idiot who goes to a casino is a mystical moron who thinks he's going to get lucky and win.

Wanna bet on that?

Re:What kind of job is that?

[sleigher]

I was only referring to the actual game and not the other bets. Coming out, get a point, roll that point or don't.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[nalagiri]

actually the casino will only throw out card counters that they expect to beat the game. many if not most card counters are horrible players who are still expected to show a loss long term, the casino will let them play until they're broke.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[jgtaco]

That really sucks, spam should be punished by law

Re:What kind of job is that?

[interstellar_donkey]

Exactly right. It's pretty difficult these days to win with card counting, especially with six deck shoes, infinite shuffles, or two deck games that only deal out 2 hands before reshuffling.

The casinos are not going to kick you out for dumb luck, and they aren't going to kick you out if you seem to be card counting but aren't doing it very well. On the other hand, they will kick you out if they see perfect play (and remember, everything you do at the table is seen by the eye in the sky. It's not just the pit bosses who are reviewing your play).

Of course, it might have changed since I used to play a lot. Back in '00-'01 I'd go to Las Vegas at least twice a month, and I'd count cards. I wasn't perfect (I'd lose the count every so often), but I still generally won more than I lost. No big amount; it was just for fun.

Only once did they say anything, and that was a night at the Tropicana where I turned $80 into $1,300 (playing flawlessly, and getting a good chunk of luck to boot) Around 4am, the casino was mostly empty, and the pit boss seemed very interested in my table. I could see him looking at me and talking on the phone to . . . someone.

Eventually he came up to me and suggested that I go back to my room and get some sleep. That was all they said. I don't know if that really meant anything or not, but I was smart enough to get the hint. I said "You're right. I'm very tired", blacked out and left.

But at the level I've played at, I've never seen any real repercussions from the house. I've played a number of times at the Tropicana since then, and nobody has said anything to me.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[asuffield]

Most of them aren't interested in "card counting". They just watch the patterns of winnings of players, and throw out the ones who consistently win. They don't care how it's done.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[asuffield]

But I agree that team blackjack play can't be considered a scam, especially the part about having spotters waiting for a hot deck. If the casino offers a game where the player has the advantage, a savvy player will take advantage of that. The casino can always change the rules of the game, or choose not to offer it.

And what the infamous book didn't mention is that the casinos figured it out and changed the rules to break it. You're not allowed to sit down in the middle of a shoe, so there is no "team play" system any more.

The problem with all these tricks is that they're short term things. As soon as you start using them, the casinos will spot you and change the rules to block it. There is no way to beat the house in the long term.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[SirSmiley]

I have a coworker who plays slot machines and if someone plays one for a long time and then leaves he jumps on it, and you know what, it pays out, he makes about 5000 a year on profits from slot machines by going every other weekend for a few hours...which are hot which are cold....you dont think slot machines are truly random do you? once he wins even a little bit he gets out of there before he can lose any earnings 21 however is a fixed game with math, slots are not....however you seem to be very cynical towards gambling, you know what its entertainment because you might win something and people enjoy it

Re:What kind of job is that?

[QuantumG]

I'm not cynical towards gambling, I'm cynical towards idiots. If you have a system and it "works" for you, good on ya. If you blow half your paycheck every week waiting for your "luck" to change then you're an idiot.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[bkr1_2k]

They had to do that because the casinos will actively inhibit anyone they know is counting cards. They will ask you to leave, even though you're playing by the rules of the game. If you do it too consistently, they'll ban you permanently, despite the fact that you have done nothing wrong.

This movie is exactly what casinos want. They want to keep people thinking they're breaking the rules by counting cards, when in fact, it's well within the rules and the only way to actually win consistently.

So, yeah, it was sort of a scam, but only because the casinos actively cheat to keep people from playing "properly".

Re:What kind of job is that?

[krinsh]

So, he basically admits to being a worthless scam artist, not once but twice? I see how that would be a good career progression.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[haystor]

...pushes on 12.

That loses with pass, but only pushes with don't pass. This pushes your odds to around 49% when betting on either pass or don't pass. don't pass is slightly in your favor, but doing that will piss off everyone at the table that you're now betting against.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[lenny6998]

I can assure that you winning ~$1,220, or as the casino is concerned "pennies", would not draw any attention towards you unless u have done this 10+ consistantly.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[sleigher]

I agree that it pisses everyone off at the table. You have to ask yourself why you are at the table though. If only for entertainment then you better not play that don't pass bar. If you are there to win then it is a good bet. Well not a good bet but better then the other bets available.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[daveywest]

Pit bosses don't notice that you win. They notice that you are changing your bet. If you bet $5 ten hands in a row, then throw down a $100 chip, the dealer is going to alert the pit boss.

I was playing $5 chips in a nevada casino and slowly started raising my bets when I had a lucky streak. (I blame good hands, and the lack of idiots at the table hitting when the dealer was showing a 16.)

Eventually they started paying me in $25 chips, but when I played the first of those, the dealer yelled out "green action" to tell the pit boss.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[FunkSoulBrother]

This can't be serious, right? This is Slashdot, we're all nerds here. A lot machine is nothing more than a random number generator matched up against a win table.

Completely made up numbers, but say you bet $1. The rngs spits out a number say from 1 to 10,000,000. If it hits 10,000,000 on the dot, you win the $1 million jackpot. If it hits 9,999,995-9,999,999 you win the 2nd best prize. If it hits between 5,000,000-8,000,000 perhaps you win $2 back. This is the basic premise.

Thus, there is no "hot" or "cold", just a random number. You could get lucky and roll a the jackpot 10 times in a row. It could never hit. If the casino wants to tighten up the machine, they just change so now it only pays $2 when you hit between 6,000,000 and 8,000,000. Its basic math.

And I say this as someone who loves to gamble, and does so more often than I really should. But to presume its anything more than just getting lucky is silly.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[FunkSoulBrother]

You still can really. All the bite in the Unlawful Internet Gambling act is about blocking financial companies like MasterCard and Western Union from transferring money around. It doesn't really say much about you, the gambler sitting at the table. Just send them a cashiers check, and they'll do the same. Problem solved.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[mog007]

Well, counting cards is already an obsolete method of trying to beat the system, because most good casinos use a combination of multiple decks of cards, and computer controlled shuffling machines to make it a futile effort.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[KidKadaver]

I agree. Casinos and the *AAs would work much better if they were made up of distinct processes that communicated via message passing rather than function calls.
I think that kind of joke is called "dropping an A-baum".

Re:What kind of job is that?

[nalagiri]

it takes a long time to identify the +EV players this way, the worst thing a casino can do is throw out a bad player on a lucky streak. and of course they care how it's done. if you work out how the guy is beating you, you might be able to stop other people doing it in future.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[Anonymous Coward]

And counting cards is in no way scamming.

he was not counting cards. He was team playing a game that is one player. The scamming does not come from his own system it comes from him working with other people. If it was acceptable to work with others why not just sit at the table and ask your team mate what the count is and start betting accordingly.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[markov_chain]

A lot machine is nothing more than a random number generator matched up against a win table.

And you know this... how exactly?

Re:What kind of job is that?

[mblase]

the Casino and it's practice ... the casino's have already "gamed" the system against it's customers ... Not according to the Casino's, ... Dude. Please. Quit abusing that apostrophe already. The possessive pronoun is spelled "its", and unless you're a British greengrocer, you're not allowed to use one when pluralizing nouns.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[jnana]

There is no way to beat the house in the long term.

Paraphrasing Keynes: in the long term, we're all dead.

So what? If it works for a while, good enough.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[geekoid]

Luck is taking probability personally. I forget who said that. Funny I remember the Penn incorrectly gets credited for it, but not that actual person. weird.

I worked ina casino, and most people know it's probability and just ave a good time. Yes some people think there is some mystic aspect, but in my experience they're in the minority.

I did see a women through her 'mystic crystal' across the casino when she lost her last dollar.
Part of me hopes she re evaluated her belief...but she probably ended up blaming electricity or some such.

reminds me of a great quote:

"Bob, 300 years from now, some complete jackass is going to be taking a homeopathic remedy in a spaceship going to Pluto." - Jay, the skeptics guide to the universe

Re:What kind of job is that?

[geekoid]

"I wasn't perfect (I'd lose the count every so often), but I still generally won more than I lost."

That's how card counting works. It's increasing your probability to win.

If you played flawlessly, it was just probability falling your way.

If the Pit Boss was talking to someone because you won 13oo dollars, it was a very sad casino.

With nobody else in the casino, he was just taking in interest in you to relieve some boredom.

1300 hundred dollars, heh.

I've seen people have a perfect streak and win 130K and the casinos interest was 'Comp him a room so he will loose it'.

I did catch a guy doing a very clever card scam. The only way I notice was that I had read W.C Fields card cheating book in 1975 and the cheat was very similar to one in that book.

I was fascinated by the Casino machine while I was employeed their. I talked with people at very level.

But it turns out casinos are pretty much teh suxxorz to work at for people like me.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[geekoid]

Completely coincidental.

Noth8ing is truly random, but slot machine come pretty damn close.

Here is a question to see if you understand probability:

"Do professional sports players streak due to the player being "on fire"?

If you answered yes, then you don't understand probability.

"...however is a fixed game with math, slots are not...."
haha, that's not true at all.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[PopeGumby]

"Do professional sports players streak due to the player being "on fire"?

If you answered yes, then you don't understand probability.

And you evidently dont understand sports, since I'm fairly sure professional sports players being successful isnt based on random probabilities.

As a players confidence grows when they're playing well, sometimes they continue to play better and better. And its not just pros that are like that. If I've been playing well recently, I tend to continue playing better and better each time I play. Then I'll have an off game, get crushed, my confidence comes down, and I have to spend the next few games building it back up again.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[Teflon_Jeff]

Frankly, I don't believe this guy. No one comes out and says "it was me" in a situation like this. Sounds like he's just trying to get his 15 minutes.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[asuffield]

It only works for a while if you're the guy who thought it up. It doesn't work for anybody else, because by the time they hear about it, it's been fixed.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[jnana]

I agree in principle, but think you're exaggerating.

A lot more than one person made boatloads of money from counting cards in the 70s and 80s, and it wasn't until after later that extensive multi-person evasion techniques were necessary. And the 'fix' you talk about is sometimes extremely difficult and/or costly to implement, so it will not be fixed as soon as it is known about.

In the long run, all techniques fail and we are all dead. In the short term, which varies from a time-scale of days to decades, not so much.

Re:What kind of job is that?

[Gninnaf]

ehem. Ever hear of this new fangled thing called no limit texas holdem? I hear they play it at casinos.

If he wanted publicity in the geek community...

[Anonymous Coward]

which helps companies correct the outdated e-mail addresses in their customer databases. this might not have been the best way to do it... The bastard.

But at least the first one

[Chmcginn]

was a mildly interesting probability problem.

Re:But at least the first one

[kclittle]

/. should allow for a special "Holier Than Thou Anonymous Coward" by-line to make folks like the parent AC feel more welcome...

Re:But at least the first one

[zippthorne]

Not really. It was interesting at one time, but by the time the MIT club was making its rounds, it had been solved for quite some time. The only really unique thing they did was to do it as a quasi-team effort, train as a team, and operate as a MIT club, with a faculty adviser (who was very poor with his advice*) and everything.

But more importantly, it really doesn't rise to the level of MIT interesting. The actual practice is just mechanical and rote, after all. There was never a question of whether or not it would work. Least of all the owners of the Casinos themselves (who even sell books on counting, knowing that few people have the discipline to pull it off)

*there shouldn't have been a club, because the theory is what's interesting at the MIT level, and that was well known. All that's left is the practice, and the practice was potentially very dangerous. At least they did it in Vegas, where the worst that can happen is to get banned from every casino in the network. As opposed to lower profile areas where they could potentially look forward to visits from the law offices of Bruiser, Slicer, Garrote and Gunn.

Re:But at least the first one

[xSauronx]

God doesn't want us to have cholesterol problems. Isn't that obvious? Pork-fat rules! /BAM!

Re:But at least the first one

[Chmcginn]

This to me seemed like an awful simplification of Christianity (read: "Cafeteria Christianity"), where one could pick and choose which books in the Bible to trust, based on one's own biases.

So, the Catholic church was allowed to make that decision once, and anyone who wishes to claim to be a follower of Jesus has to listen to what they decided in about 300 AD?

(For the record, I was raised Catholic, left that church, and joined another which recognized only the four Gospels & Act as canon, the rest were relegated to the same status the Gnostic texts hold for Catholics.)

Re:But at least the first one

[PopeRatzo]

Let everybody mod me off-topic, but I don't know how the heck you were modded informative. The sig said "...mentioned in the New Testament...", which is where those passages came from. Or is there a New Improved and Highly Abridged New Testament, containing only the Gospel of the Cafeteria Christian, which narrates how Jesus was only a peace-loving hippie who just wanted us all to get along and embrace each other?

-Francis Ocoma

Go soak your head, Francis

I came here to read comments about the kids from MIT who beat the house playing blackjack, not your silly superstitions.

Re:But at least the first one

[RockDoctor]

*there shouldn't have been a club, because the theory is what's interesting at the MIT level, and that was well known. All that's left is the practice, and the practice was potentially very dangerous.

By extension then, there shouldn't be an MIT BASE-jumping club. How about cave-diving? Bungee-cording? Big-wall alpinism? Polar travel? Off-piste skiing? Technical diving? Motor racing? Standard scuba diving? Swimming? Walking? going to bars in the more "interesting" areas of town (around here if my beer-fuddled memory is good).

Almost all clubs and societies are built around things that have a well-understood theory but which require practice ; many are significantly dangerous. Where do you draw the line? For students who are, let's not forget, adults. (It's a very different argument for minors.)

Re:But at least the first one

[focoma]

I came here to read comments about the kids from MIT who beat the house playing blackjack, not your silly superstitions.

Really?! Believe it or not, your holiness, I came here to read about the MIT kids, too! (Does this make this post on-topic now? No? Oh well...) Now, silly superstition or not, do you deny that Geoffrey's reply to the Anonymous Coward was flawed? Wait...do you think *I* was the Anonymous Coward? I wasn't. I don't flame just because of some offensive sig. But I'll happily join a flamefest from time to time, on-topic or not, like any normal geek. Good day to you.

P.S. I tried your suggestion. Head-soaking is a surprisingly pleasant experience. I think I'll do it often from now on. Thanks!

Someone's not doing their job

[pickyouupatnine]

Really guys... frontpage material?... This dumbass story? The guy gets free publicity cuz he claims to be some guy?

Blackjack professionals

[eebra82]

More info on blackjack professionals can be found over at blackjack.org. They cover some info on the MIT team as well.

Re:Blackjack professionals

[Don_dumb]

There's more info (including a different MIT team, which was the one I thought of, when I read the summary). Is contained in this text of a Horizon episode.here

Isn't it obvious?

[Idgit]

The real mastermind is Keyser Soze.

Re:Isn't it obvious?

[rwyoder]

The real mastermind is Keyser Soze.

"The greatest trick the gambler ever pulled, was convincing the house he did not exist."

Re:Isn't it obvious?

[jimmyharris]

The real mastermind is Keyser Soze.

"The greatest trick the gambler ever pulled, was convincing the house he did not exist."

It's more like "The greatest trick the house ever pulled, was convincing the gambler that he did not exist."

predicate nominative

[Anonymous Coward]

It's he.

Re:The way to win is simple...the basics

[Mr. Underbridge]

Good troll, sir.

Card counting is overrated

[jorghis]

Card counting is waaayyyyy overhyped in terms of effectiveness and profitibility. You (or your teammate if you are sneaky) have to sit there for a long time losing money waiting for a 'hot' shoe. A hot shoe really isnt all that hot either, think 51% in favor of the player. Then you have to bet huge in order to make up for all the time you sat there losing money. Do the math here for just one second, a 1% player advantage is about 10 dollars a hand winnings on average with a thousand dollar bet. In addition to all that hot shoes wont last for very long either, so dont go thinking "hey 10 bucks a hand for a few hours sounds pretty good to me". You will be doing good just to make up for all the hands your teammates spent losing money while you waited for a hot shoe.

Even these famous teams that everyone talks about werent really all that profitable. Sure, millions of dollars may sound like a lot but thats divided up among dozens of team members over the course of several years. It wasnt 5 guys over a few weekends like in the movie 21. Do the division a few times and it quickly becomes apparant that it really isnt worth it even if you discount the fact that you are risking a large sum of money in the endeavor. If you are going to get a lot of dedicated people together and put lots of money at risk you can do a hell of a lot better than playing blackjack.

It may make for good books, movies, etc. but if card counting was really all that effective vegas would be losing money to a brand new team every week. There is a reason everyone isnt doing it and its not because adding one for a face card and subtracting one for a low card requires 1337 math skills.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[zIRtrON]

Agreed.
In my uni days, in Sydney, I used to go to the casino and play craps mainly, and if I won blackjack. Counting cards is waaaay over-rated as you say.
Betting on 6 & 8 paid well 11 times in a row which had me up a small fortune. But on the 12th and 14th visit, I "did my arse" as they say. I wasn't overly greedy, maintained the steady betting rate.

There are much better ways to make money if you are a skilled person.

The vibe at a casino is generally a negative one too - always anxious/anticipating/waiting for the bank to win.

These days, I don't enjoy gambling one bit. There are much more fulfilling ways to spend ones time. Work, do your work, then PLAYTIME!

Re:Card counting is overrated

[Dahamma]

Hmm, what does a 6/8 craps betting strategy have to do with counting cards?

Craps is pure chance, and the only thing you can do is place bets with the least house advantage, there is no skill whatsoever.

Card counting is a way to use skill/knowledge to maximize your odds beyond random chance.

I guess I agree card counting is overrated, but your story doesn't back that up at all ;)

Re:Card counting is overrated

[vinn01]

Also, a reason everyone isn't doing it - is because it's so easy to get detected and blackballed from every casino in town.

After sitting at a table placing small bets for hours, you're going to attract a lot of attention if you start betting big money (because the shoe became 'hot') in hopes of making up for all the hands you spent losing money while you waited for the hot shoe.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[QuantumG]

You should read Breaking Vegas also by Ben Mezrich. It describes some techniques, that used to work, which exploits the fact that when the dealer shuffles the deck they often inadvertently show the first base player the bottom card - then they ask another player at the table to cut the deck which, with practice, can be done precisely. This places a known card at a specific position in the deck (typically 52 cards in) and by carefully playing the table the team can arrange for the known card to fall on the most opportune hand. For example, if the known card is an ace, the team can arrange for it to land on the hand showing a picture card to make a blackjack.. if the known card is a picture card, the team can arrange for it to land as the dealer's 3rd card, typically busting them.

This doesn't give you a 1% or 2% house edge, like card counting, it gives you a 30% to 60% house edge.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[jorghis]

I agree that if done correctly that is possible, but:

1) Peeking at cards can get you thrown in jail, unlike card counting. (there is some legalese I dont totally understand about "actively" versus "passively" attempting to view the card, but with what you are suggesting I am pretty sure its considered actively trying to peek at cards)

2) Trying to cut to a certain card X number of cards in is super hard even with practice (believe me, as a practitioner of lame card tricks I have practiced) :) and one other guy at your table hitting/staying at the wrong time can easily throw things off even if you were able to perfectly cut to card number 52 or whatever number. I believe this is one of those things where the theoretical profitability is much higher than the actual profitability due to the difficulty of actually pulling it off.

3) I doubt that any casino these days is going to have the dealers working in such a way that allows anyone to see the bottom card. (of course you did mention this alraedy) :)

Re:Card counting is overrated

[SpinyNorman]

Which is why you do it as a team - with counters who bet minimum waiting for the table to become hot, then the big players who come in when signalled and start throwing the big bucks down and playing double spots. Everyone remains consistent.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[QuantumG]

Outside Vegas, most casinos use continuous automatic card shufflers. As a result, the game is pretty much dead.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[jorghis]

That may make things slightly more difficult to detect but not a lot. It is a REALLY well known strategy (most people reading slashdot have heard of it and this isnt even a gambling related website). One big player moving tables a lot and throwing down thousands of dollars a hand will attract a lot of attention. It may not be as obvious but its not easy to grind away for the hundreds of hours it takes to come ahead in blackjack without getting caught at it either. Casinos know to watch for it.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[FinalMidnight]

My step-brother is a professional musician and pianist. He was playing in a piano lounge for a Casino and making decent money. Each night after his shift, he'd go to the blackjack tables and play, counting cards.

After a few consistent wins, up a hundred dollars a night nothing big, he was called into an office where they demanded to know how he was cheating. Who was he colluding with? When he said he was all by himself and just counting cards, the management told him that "It isn't possible with a seven deck shoe" They proceeded to fire him and black list him. The blacklist is shared amongst all casinos in Australia. Now with the use of their Facial Recognition systems on casino security cameras, this is very effective.

So to make the point, Casinos don't need much of a reason to kick you out and make sure you never come back. They are in the business of vacuuming all of the money from the pockets of suckers. If they notice that you are consistently winning then you'll be asked to leave.

FM.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[trawg]

Heh I've always wondered about blackjack - years ago John Carmack of id Software wrote a .plan update about how he went and played at some casino (found this site which includes the copy of his update at the time) - it sounded like he walked in, played for a few hours and won $20k (which he donated to the FSF).

I always remembered that; I don't gamble because I don't know the numbers well enough to feel like I'd be doing anything other than having fun (and I'd rather spend my money 'having fun' at the pub or at the movies or something), but I specifically remember that as an example of how just knowing a bunch of stuff about numbers and probability can affect gambling, and that if I'm ever going to get into it I'm going to learn the hell out of the odds before I do anything!

(I seem to recall some mention of the casino staff asking him to leave because he was winning so much so fast, but maybe I imagined that)

Re:Card counting is overrated

[SpinyNorman]

No-ones saying it's easy - if it was then the Casinos's would be losing money on the game and wouldn't offer it. OTOH the fact that everyone knows about basic strategy and counting means that it's easier for the pros to blend in since perfect play doesn't make you stand out, and there are always going to be more obvious counters than the real professionals. Team play makes it easier and quicker to make money, but bear in mind there have been and presumably still are many legendary players who did it on their own - try reading Ken Uston's "Million Dollar Blackjack" if you like this stuff!

Re:Card counting is overrated

[mabhatter654]

That's what the cute girl spotters were for... they'd bet like a regular girl player out to play for fun, and watch for signs that the deck was about to "streak". That cut down the time the really good players would be tied up.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

He's a great programmer, but every other blackjack player knows the "perfect strategy" for blackjack. It still gives the house a minute advantage. You will still be more likely to lose $20K than win $20K. Use some common sense!

Re:Card counting is overrated

[mabhatter654]

that's not real card counting at all. Real counting is simply keeping track of what cards are where and the probability of what's left in the deck. If you know the good hands (considerable skill) by how other players call, you can guess what they have... and guess what's left for you. Along with that, hand shuffled decks after a few hands aren't really random as the cards are collected from winning hands and that cool shuffling by pros is very NOT random if you pay attention. There's no need to "cheat" and see cards you shouldn't at all.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[QuantumG]

If they show you the card, it isn't cheating, it's using the information you were given. No-one said it was card counting.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[mbstone]

Whatever the effectiveness of card counting, the movie wasn't about card counting so much as it was about "Wonging" (the practice of inviting a big-betting confederate to join the game only when the count is favorable). The casinos no longer allow "mid-shoe entry," i.e. a new player must wait until after a shuffle to enter the game). End of Wonging.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[RockModeNick]

I knew a guy at work that would cheat at WAR. He'd goad a few guys into playing, and as he took cards, he'd carefully slip the "power" cards onto the bottom of his stack. Doing this, his power cards were always in a run, and he'd be more likely to take out other players power cards over time. He didn't care how many poor cards he won or lost. He'd win about 80% of the time.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

thats why these guys stories is so fascinating

they were there at the beginning, the very start of card counting for large sums of money, they evolved the 'hustle'

they worked in teams, one guy would go sit at the table, make $5 bets and count the shoe, when the shoe was hot they'd signal to another team member on the floor, that guy would then signal to another team member - dressed sharp in a suit - who would then sit down and bet thousands per hand.

to the house it appears as though the rich businessman just sat down and started betting, nothing strange there, when infact he's the big bettor of the group.

these guys made MILLIONS upon MILLIONS. they would finish classes on Friday and fly out to Vegas and could make $1m in a weekend, fly back sunday and go to class on monday. that adds up when you're doing it for years..

Re:Card counting is overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me introduce you to a little friend: no mid-shoe entry.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[drfireman]

Card counting is also way overhyped in terms of the brilliance of its practitioners. Sure, it takes some insight to come up with the idea of card counting, and somewhat less insight to come up with a new, useful, card counting system. So we're talking about a handful of people in those clubs. And it takes some imagination, if not technical genius, to circumvent the defenses casinos have put in place, handle the logistics, etc., so I'll give someone a little bit of credit for that. The rest of the people involved, like most of the people in Mezrich's books, are sheep. The fact that Mezrich hypes the genius of the team members so relentlessly (at least in Bringing Down the House) is just a form of dishonesty. They may each have been brilliant in some way, but the kind of brilliance involved in card counting is more akin to assembly line work than higher mathematics. Einstein mowing the lawn. Unfortunately, this kind of dishonesty is readily propagated, because the reality is not as sexy (metaphorically speaking) as a team of super-geniuses led by a super-super-genius mastermind.

Incidentally, while it's true that the edges are narrow, another reason card counting is tough is because casinos do things to the rules and procedures to make it unprofitable. I think shuffling machines are a big culprit. With many decks and poor penetration, it's an uphill battle even before you consider the half dozen rules that might be set the wrong way. Not to mention the fact that at least in Las Vegas, they can kick you out if your betting patterns are too obvious. Last I heard, most of the effort in beating blackjack was related to finding good games before they went away. That's also something that doesn't take a super-genius, it takes someone who's good with a cell phone.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[hansamurai]

Blackballed? I almost want to bet that Vegas bankrolled this movie in the hopes that a bunch of lousy gamblers and wannabe card counters head to their casinos and blow all their money.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[Kozz]

and one other guy at your table hitting/staying at the wrong time can easily throw things off even

And when I used to frequent a local casino playing blackjack (for fun, not really counting, etc), that was my biggest pet peeve: Some jerk at the end of the table saying you screwed him up because you hit/stayed at the wrong time and now he got the wrong card. In a card-counting scenario as you lay out, I can understand how it would be important. But in a casual game with one guy complaining, I often want to tell him to STFU.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[HEbGb]

Absolutely right, sir. I still play (and count) for fun here and there myself, but it's all entertainment for me.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

hese guys made MILLIONS upon MILLIONS.

No. They actually lost money. They were up big at one point. Then lost it all, and then some.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[bkr1_2k]

"It may not be as obvious but its not easy to grind away for the hundreds of hours it takes to come ahead in blackjack without getting caught at it either."

This is what I don't get. Why do people keep insisting it takes "hundreds of hours" to get ahead or find a hot table?

If you have a 3 deck table, it only takes about 100 cards or so before you know where the cards are, basically. It actually takes a little less than that, but I can't remember for sure so I'm roughing it. So, assuming my numbers are right, at a full table (5 seats) that's 6 rounds (average is 3 cards per hand). Most dealers can do that in less than half an hour. And, playing as a team, the "loser" still has decent odds of winning some portion of the hands they play, but let's say they lose 80%. On a $10 table, you've lost only $50 dollars if you lose 80% of your hands. But now you signal your partner and he starts betting $10000 per hand to your $10. If he wins 1 hand you've more than sufficiently made up for the $50 you've lost. Between the two of you, there's $9950 to split for a half hour worth of work. I don't know about you, but I think that's a pretty decent pay rate.

This is the reason single deck tables usually won't allow mid round entry into a game.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[bkr1_2k]

Actually, perfect play is exactly what makes you stand out because invariably even professional counters make mistakes. They're just more consistent about figuring out their mistakes.

You're right though, team play makes it easier and significantly faster.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[bkr1_2k]

They weren't there at the beginning by any stretch of the imagination. People have been counting cards for 100 years, and documenting their systems for over 60, at least. Read "beat the dealer" for a more complete history of different systems. By the way, that's the book the MIT guys learned the system from, according to one interview I heard.

These guys just got famous for doing it in a slightly new way and got more famous by writing a book to promote themselves.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[bkr1_2k]

That's exactly why most tables "burn" the top card. You know what it is, which gives you some advantage, but not the advantage you're discussing because the card is never put into play.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[kria]

I've read the book, and part of point two is taken into account - they made sure only people from their team are at the table.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[vinn01]

Even the most loosely run casino pays reasonable attention to bets of $25 or more (if they didn't they would be out of business). The idea that a high roller can come in and out of games, make big bets (when the real count happens to be highly positive), and avoid detection for more than a couple of days is laughable.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[jorghis]

Considering most of the movie is shot inside of Vegas casinos, I would say that its a safe bet they are loving the publicity.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[jorghis]

Well yes, if hot shoes came up every half hour and you won 100% of the time when a shoe was hot blackjack would be pretty damn profitable and everyone would be betting 10 thousand dollars a hand. :) But that isnt the case, thats the movie/book fantasyland.

1) A hot shoe isnt some automatic thing that will happen as soon as you get more than halfway through the deck. Its actually pretty unlikely to have the cards distributed in that manner. You will need to play a LOT more than 6 rounds to get to it.

2) You assume that the player will win 100% of the time when betting a thousand dollars with a hot shoe. Thats nuts. More like 50.5%. You have to play thousands of hands with a 1% advantage in order for it to be noticable.

3) In order to play the thousands of hands necessary for point 2 you have to wait through hundreds of hands on point one. Multiply hundreds by thousands you get hundreds of hours. And this is the ideal scenario, in practice it will likely be worse.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

they were there at the beginning, the very start of card counting for large sums of money, they evolved the 'hustle'

they were there at the beginning for "large sums of money". up until then no one had the capital to pool together to do what they did. it was true shock n awe on the casinos.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[fuego451]

"Craps is pure chance, and the only thing you can do is place bets with the least house advantage, there is no skill whatsoever."

I'd disagree slightly with this. Just knowing how the game is played, odds of various bets and knowing the correct amount you can bet, playing 'right' and 'wrong'(best odds of any game in the house), paying attention to the play(especially after a few drinks, buxom waitresses), staying away from 'sucker' bets, etc., would all count as a certain degree of skill.

I don't think ziRtrON was relating buying the 6/8 to card counting. Just that at 6:4 odds you can make a lot of money quickly on a 'hot' table.

My biggest problem is throwing the dice. After years of use and damage, my hands don't always do what I intend. I once hit a stick-man in the face with a die. He told me I was the first to do that. Very embarrassing.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[Dahamma]

I'd disagree slightly with this. Just knowing how the game is played, odds of various bets and knowing the correct amount you can bet, playing 'right' and 'wrong'(best odds of any game in the house), paying attention to the play(especially after a few drinks, buxom waitresses), staying away from 'sucker' bets, etc., would all count as a certain degree of skill.

Ok, I have to agree "skill" was not the correct word - craps is actually my favorite casino game for most of the above reasons.

I just meant there is no real "extra effort" you can make to increase your odds beyond what the house explicitly offers. This may sound like an obvious statement, but after years of debating with a friend who claims he has a "strategy" for roulette...

Re:Card counting is overrated

[SpinyNorman]

On a table with $100 or $500 minimum bet they are not going to pay attention to $25 bets ;-)

The book the movie is based on mentions that on a (boxing) fight night at the Casino (which attracts high rollers) one of the team player was playing two spots at $6,000 per hand without attracting undue attention. The casinos have "whales" (the biggest players) who think nothing of flying in for the weekend and losing a few million at the tables.

Remember that up until they are tagged as card counters, these pro players are treated like royalty. The casinos primarily guage people by how much they bet, not how mush they win/lose, since they know that statistics will take care of the rest. The MIT team/etc where playing for a lot of money and were being comp'd hotel suites, etc ... their large bets (until the casinos finally - after YEARS - figured it out) did not cause suspiscion - they were very welcome - exactly what the casinos WANTED to see from their high-rollers!

Re:Card counting is overrated

[bkr1_2k]

Yes, I did make it a little simpler than reality, but in a 3 deck game, it's not that hard to count the cards and the odds of getting a decent advantage aren't thousands of hands.

It's certainly more than 6, as you point out, but it's definitely not in the thousands, perhaps in the low hundred range based on what I've read for good players.

The odds of winning with the high betting hand are not 100% but it's much better than the 50.5% you suggest. It's more like a 8-10% advantage for the player at that point (some estimate higher) which is why you bet high at that point of the game. Sure, that's still far less than 100%, but it's not going to take hundreds of hours. Either way, you're enjoying your time (presumably) or you wouldn't be there in the first place, right?

Re:Card counting is overrated

[jnana]

Just that at 6:4 odds you can make a lot of money quickly on a 'hot' table.

Except that there's no such thing as a 'hot' table.

No more so than tossing 5 heads in a row means that you all of a sudden have a 'hot' coin.

Maybe you mean that as a figure of speech, but it's an extremely misleading one that idiots everywhere believe in to their peril.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[fuego451]

"Maybe you mean that as a figure of speech

Indeed, I do. When you stand at a craps table for hours and experience hot and cold runs of the dice, those terms, and the feelings that go with them, seem very appropriate. Some experienced craps players take this 'feeling' to extremes and will walk away from a table if the ambiance is disturbed in any way.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[PopeGumby]

That doesnt make any sense...

For example, if the known card is an ace, the team can arrange for it to land on the hand showing a picture card to make a blackjack.. Since blackjack is composed of one picture card and one ace, and all players get their two cards in one round of dealing, how did the players know who was going to get the face card, and, having established that, how did they manipulate the deal to get the ace to the person with the jack? did someone pull out of the draw before they got their second card? you cant do that.

if the known card is a picture card, the team can arrange for it to land as the dealer's 3rd card,

wouldnt that require the participation of every single player at the table? and how did the first person communicate to every single other person what the card was?

this is sounding a little shenaniganish...

Re:Card counting is overrated

[QuantumG]

Yes, you need a team to take every seat on the table. And you communicate either by hand signals or by code words. As for the ace placement, maybe I got that bit wrong..

Re:Card counting is overrated

[PopeGumby]

okay cool, yeah i read further down about the whole team taking all the seats at the table, thats definitely feasible,

but im not sure how knowing the position of one card will do much good, except yeah if you can flick it to the dealer at an inopportune moment.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[QuantumG]

If you know the 52nd card is a 10, you just have to hit or stand on the appropriate hand to get it to land on the dealer's hand.. 3rd card being a 10 will bust most dealer hands.. if he has to draw :) There's still "counting" involved.. it's just counting up to 52.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[PopeGumby]

yeah, but what if the 52nd card is 4 cards away at the start of the round, with 3 people at the table? how do you coordinate people - does everyone take one card, or some people take more? if you get to the 3rd person and the first two have used up the 3 cards, what if the 3rd person is sitting on a total less than 10? wont people sitting on sub-10 scores attract the attention of the bosses? especially if, having realised this was going to be the hand that the 52nd card came out, everyone bet big on this particular hand?

it just seems like a lot of effort to go to to win one hand, especially as the dealers two cards are also unknown, and might not bust on 10, although obviously as you mentioned it is the most likely result...

Re:Card counting is overrated

[QuantumG]

Every in the team can see everyone else's cards. Everyone in the team can count up to 52. It's not exactly hard to see who is going to need to hit and who isn't.. so the team can come up with the least suspicious way to hold back or take the necessary number of cards. You also know which hand the 52nd card is going to fall in, so the team bets big on that hand. In my local casino they used to shuffle cards in a way that showed the bottom card.. then one day they started turning over the deck with the cut card. Until I read this book I really just thought it was a flourish.. I see now that they were trying to hide the bottom card by covering it with the cut card instead of the dealer's hand. When I think back, I can remember a few times when the dealer accidentally showed the bottom card and had to reshuffle the deck.. I never knew why. Now, of course, they have continuous automatic shuffling machines.. and even regular card counting doesn't work.

Re:Card counting is overrated

[rograndom]

Outside Vegas, most casinos use continuous automatic card shufflers. As a result, the game is pretty much dead.

Which means that people will stop playing the games with the automatic card shufflers and the casinos will either: a) lose those players to competing casinos without card shufflers (and 90% of the people who think they're counters, aren't and are actually losing players and making the house money), or b) they get rid of the card shufflers. The same thing happened when "Beat the Dealer" came out. The casino actually wants people who deviate away from basic strategy and increase their bets when they "think" the count is favorable but is actually off by just 1 or 2.

Re:The way to win is simple...the basics

[Anonymous Coward]

"oh look he used some fancy math terms +1 insightful/informative!"

Its just gobbledegook guys. :)

Bullshit

[Doc Ruby]

I was close friends with John Chang's friend and partner in the "MIT blackjack team" during the 1990s. I met Chang in Cambridge, and almost joined the team (I was too busy with programming work I preferred, that also made me pretty rich). This was all before anyone (other than some security firms, and a lot of hookers) had ever heard of the team. I was there for some wild times with some of these actual characters, and was there when they returned from some extreme gambling junkets - some very lucrative, some losers, lots of them extremely exciting.

I heard _Bringing Down the House_ was being written while its author was interviewing my friend and his teammates. I read it, and was very disappointed in both the shabby writing style, and its omission of some of my favorite stories from those days. Maybe the team kept some of it quiet in self-defense, but those were much better stories than made it into the book. I asked my friend what he thought of the movie now that it's out, but he confirmed what I expected: even lamer than the book.

There was only one other blackjack team in the world at the time that was as consistently in the money, and it wasn't at MIT - or even from the US, as far as I knew - according to the team that I knew, which was as inside as anyone could get. Maybe this other Boston guy was a player. But MIT isn't that big a place, and there wasn't some other team. Certainly not one that so closely resembled the one that showed up in the book, and now the movie.

This guy is bluffing.

Re:Bullshit

[Brownstar]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Blackjack_Team#Strategic_Investments.2C_1992-1993

(look at reference articles as well as the wiki page).

Kaplan was one of the founders along with Chang of Strategic Investments.

Kaplan also helped trained Chang in a previous incarnation of the team.

So I guess you don't know as much as you'd like to think you do.

Now whether the character is based on Kaplan or Chang, I have no clue.

Re:Bullshit

[MadAhab]

Interesting.

I know an MIT blackjack player who was "on the team" and I heard about it when he was actually doing it (and the world at large had no idea about it) and he was making craploads of money on summer vacation. He's making bucketfuls now in the financial world. I can't say I heard this guy's name, but then again, I never heard any names.

The story is worthy of a better treatment (fiction or non-fiction) than it's gotten, for a variety of reasons that seem sort of obvious to me: lack of true sleaze factor, lack of heist movie payoff, it's hard to write gangster-cool roles for nerds, etc. "Cool Hand Luke" has not ensued. Basically, someone would have to write a compelling character story, which would be much easier if any of these folks had subsequently been involved in major crime/scandal, or else just quit and moved to Hawaii and surfed while living off a repetoire of cheap bar bet stunts, but that hasn't happened.

Re:Bullshit

[Doc Ruby]

Except that Kaplan was not part of the events that make the story worth telling, the events that Spacey's character portrays. By the time that the team was recruiting from MIT students not already connected to the team, Kaplan wasn't part of the action.

There were plenty of people connected to the team who I didn't know. I wasn't there when it was started, or even for the majority of its adventures. But I knew it well enough to know that Kaplan wasn't the model for Spacey's character, or any other interesting story about the team. Which is all that I said.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, I cant count the number of times Doc Ruby has proudly posted that he knows so and so and met with such and such. This isnt the first time hes made some mistake that indicates he either is overstating his personal relationships while playing the name dropping game or just making stuff up.

I am guessing he didnt totally make it up, there have been hundreds of card counters from cambridge. It isnt that big of a deal to know one or two of them in passing.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I met Chang in Cambridge , and almost joined the team (I was too busy with programming work I preferred, that also made me pretty rich ). If you were studying in Cambridge, you already had the money, douchebag. Thank your rich assed parents for that one. 'Ooh, look at the money I made.' Fuckers like you make me sick.

Re:Bullshit

[Doc Ruby]

Except that I'm not making a mistake, as would be clear if you'd read either my reply or even just understood the difference between Kaplan's claims to be Spacey's character, and Kaplan's early, tangential role in the team.

Look, Anonymous jealous Coward, I have an interesting life, I get around, I've been there to do things that are notable. It's not my fault that while you do nothing but post from your mom's basement. I like sharing that with other people, but your whining is the boring part.

Re:Bullshit

[Doc Ruby]

My friend from the team has an extremely interesting story, of which the MIT team is only a part (though the one with the most fireworks for the screen). But I think he'd rather be rich than famous, and there is good reason to believe they'd have to choose one or the other ;).

Re:Bullshit

[Doc Ruby]

You're an idiot, Anonymous jealous Coward. I wasn't in Camridge to attend school - I was in Cambridge to meet Chang (and to hang out with my friend, his partner). I was already out of school for years, and I dropped out. From a school I had attended on full academic scholarship, though I worked a regular job for extra money - my parents didn't support me. I made my money on my wits and balls (and some luck, like most people who do). There are plenty of people at school in MIT, though, who don't come from money. My friend there, for example, came from broke immigrant parents, also there on scholarship.

I own the credit for making myself rich, though I am grateful to my parents (who were middle class, and supported me pretty well, including letting me buy a computer in the early 1980s with saved birthday present money). Mainly because they raised me to feel no shame at either making lots of money or not.

You, on the other hand, have major problems, with jealousy (and logic, and basic decency). Since you're also evidently not rich, you've got no business even talking to me.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I am just trying to give you some friendly advice so dont take this the wrong way. :)

Your first post came across as "I know so and so and blah blah blah". "Of course I was important enough to be on the team but I was so brilliant and making so much money that there was no point".

It kind of follows the self important formula of:

1) Just happen to mention that I know someone famous.

2) Just happen to mention that I am rich.

3) Just happen to mention that I am well educated.

When you talk with that whole "let me casually mention a bunch of reasons why I am so great" attitude people tend to react very negatively towards you especially on the internet. It works great for picking up girls though. :)

Re:Bullshit

[Doc Ruby]

I appreciate your attempt to help, but I don't think it's for me.

I didn't actually mention that I know someone famous - they're not. The Spacey character is fictional (though plausible from the facts), as is the character in the book. And I didn't mention that I'm well educated - I met Chang in Cambridge while visiting my friend, and didn't imply otherwise.

I am rich, and pretty "brilliant", and I have plenty of friends. My way sure worked well to pick up girls, and what I said is all true. Now why should I take your advice?

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, Anonymous jealous Coward, I have an interesting life, I get around, I've been there to do things that are notable. It's not my fault that while you do nothing but post from your mom's basement. I like sharing that with other people, but your whining is the boring part. Says the guy who is pushing 17 thousand posts on slashdot. You would probably be president or maybe there would be a nursery rhyme about doc ruby by now if you cut back on posting some.

Re:Bullshit

[Doc Ruby]

So you say in a Slashdot post.

If you're good at what you do, you have time to do it, and to post about it on Slashdot, too. Especially if you're good enough to get rich and semi-retire right around the time Slashdot gets started.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

here are plenty of people at school in MIT, though, who don't come from money Only 21% come from families that make under 60k. And guess what, 75% of families in the US make 68,304 or less. That means 21% represents just under 75% of the population. That's not jealousy so much as realism. A group is being discriminated against, how's that for basic decency. Assuming you went to MIT, maybe you were one of those 21%, but then you go and deny that this problem exists (like the vast majority do), a behavior I expect would be inconsistent with the views of one of the 21%.

If you didn't go to MIT, not much offense meant, if you did, well, I don't much like you. (I would downgrade fucker to asshole in that case. Since you said you were in Cambridge but didn't specify where you went, I made the assumption that you went to the giant douche-hall across the river, which, despite what the facts reveal about MIT, is much worse). Yeah, I know, judging a person by the institution is stupid, I don't really care.

Since you're also evidently not rich, you've got no business even talking to me. Yup, 79%

Re:Bullshit

[jorghis]

That doesnt prove discrimination. It could be (and probably is in my view) the case that richer families are able to do a better job of raising their children and giving them a good education as the grow up. In this case MIT wouldnt be discriminating, they would just be taking the best students available to them. Unless you consider accepting the best qualified students to be discriminatory.

And no, I didnt go to MIT and I grew up in a family that was in the "poor" 75%. (if you can call under 60k poor, Americans are so wealthy they seem to develop strange ideas about what economic hardship is like)

Re:Bullshit

[Doc Ruby]

It's pretty obvious why you didn't go to MIT.

For one, I didn't say that I did, and then I said that I didn't, but you haven't caught on to that simple fact yet. For another, 21% is a big fraction, and I said "plenty". 1 out of five people is "plenty". Yet another, as another response to your post mentioned, growing up with some money can help you get into MIT because you have more resources with which to develop your mind. That development is the basis for getting into MIT for most of its students, however they come by the development. It's not supposed to reflect America in microcosm (look it up), it's supposed to reflect America's smartest. It's unfair that having money offers benefits, including learning advantages, that not everyone can get, but that's why people want to be rich. Why people like me work hard and use our smarts to get rich.

So I didn't really deny "the problem" exists, I just denied that everyone at MIT is rich, as you insisted, but which you certainly can't prove by offering evidence that over a fifth of them come from families that make less than what 75% of Americans make.

But really, you're far from MIT material because you can't even understand when I tell you that you've got no business talking to me because you've got major problems. The fact that you don't understand that you're not being rich offers no alternative reason for you to have business to talk with me, further confirms that you're not so bright.

Kinda dumb, pretty obnoxious, relatively uneducated, intensely jealous, no money to offer, unable to pick up even free clues - you're getting nothing more from me.

Goodbye, and better luck next time.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

The discrimination isn't de jure, but its still there. I agree with you that the wealthy, on average, probably do a better job at education their kids (ex. private schools, schools from better neighborhoods), but when you factor in the thousands of applicants that top schools receive, there's more than enough from every economic quartile to fill all the seats. Why then do the top quartile dominate the population? I can't say for sure, but I sure know what it looks like.

And no, I don't consider 60k 'poor' or anything, that area just happens to be where the second highest quartile ends, and anyone below that mark, statistically speaking, has 1/4 the chances of getting into MIT than someone born above it.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

For one, I didn't say that I did, and then I said that I didn't, but you haven't caught on to that simple fact yet. ...and you didn't catch the if/than statements I was using. Great CYA statements, they are.

It's not supposed to reflect America in microcosm (look it up), it's supposed to reflect America's smartest. Taking that logic, how about setting up a nice monarchy? After all, people prepared from day one to be leaders will be better at the job. Oh, and I know what a microcosm is, it's not an uncommon word (unless one's just learned it).

My little strawman aside, even if that was a good reason, there are thousands of applicants. MIT got 11231 last year, accepts a few points less than about 10%, I believe, but lets just round numbers and assume we're talking 10% and 10,000 applicants. Now, that would mean that 2% of them are from the lower 75% of the population. Is it unreasonable to assume that out of the 9,000 remaining, there's not, at the very least, another 200 if not 550 (raising the !;! ratio for the top quartile and the rest with regards to the total population), qualified students not from the top quartile? Even if not, assume that that those 550 are still very well qualified, haven't they demonstrated the ability to do almost as good with less. Sure, they might be currently less qualified, but that's not taking into account that they show more general potential for academic growth. I suppose its a mater of opinion, (to put it into an easy to grasp dichotomy) choosing A++ students who have had great opportunities as opposed to A+ who have had ordinary opportunities, but I'll take the latter.

Now, since 1/5 is plenty, let's visualize this number. You have four people, representing the economic quartiles, and a pizza with ten slices, representing seats at MIT. One person takes eight slices, and leaves two for the other three, then claims he's hungrier, so that's fair. I don't claim to be a math wiz, but there's something wrong with that picture.

So I didn't really deny "the problem" exists, I just denied that everyone at MIT is rich Correct, not everyone, just the majority.

which you certainly can't prove by offering evidence that over a fifth of them come from families that make less than what 75% of Americans make. Read the first part of that line a few times, specifically the part where I can't prove something with evidence that proves it.

The fact that you don't understand that you're not being rich offers no alternative reason for you to have business to talk with me I could say the fact that you've got an obvious typo means that you've got no business talking to me, but neither intellect nor financial determines who has 'business' talking with who, especially on an internet message board. If I didn't know any better, I'd say your statement betrays a tinge of elitism. The ad Hominems do the same. I might not like your views, but you seem smart enough.

Kinda dumb, pretty obnoxious, relatively uneducated, intensely jealous, no money to offer, unable to pick up even free clues - Yeah, I'm obnoxious, but if 1/5 is plenty, I guess so is 1/6.

you're getting nothing more from me. What makes you think this has anything to do with you, you don't seriously think I'm posting these comments for your education, do you? I've got what I came here for, . After the initial troll comment (apologies, btw [and what's up with the mods today, that inane comment hasn't even been modded down yet]) opened the way for a nice heated debate, you opened with initial points that I rebutted and that you then rebutted. I do this only to test the mindset of an Ivy level college apologist and refine my points should I encounter one in meatspace. It's been awhile since I've actually had the chance to; I left the board I used to do this on after my main sparing partner (so to speak) tried to tell me that multivariate analysis makes the scientific method obsolete. Now THAT guy was a moron. I'll assume that you didn't read this comment (even though you have) and bid you farewell & better luck next time as well.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as someone who got accepted to Harvard from a family earning far less than the top quartile (as in qualifying for food stamps), growing up in a rural area where the majority of people were low-wage laborers for large ag businesses, I will have to say that it's amazing that they accept as many not in the top economic quartile as they do, and my experience leads me to believe it's absolutely not because of discrimination.

I think you're severely underestimating the educational resources available to the top quartile (and honestly, you're up against the top decile or centile there during the admissions process (and internationally, not just in the US)).

To put it into perspective...

I was at a lecture given by Arthur Laffer, and I felt lucky that I had studied enough economics on my own to understand the content. On the other hand, one of my roommates was on a first name basis with him, and had had access to regular formal and informal instruction by economists of a similar level and breadth of experience (including liberal-leaning ones) while growing up.

My HS only offered 3 AP classes total (and 1 of those I had to take over the TV), while a different roommate had taken (and maxed) something like 14. One of his friends (who also got accepted to Harvard, incidentally) had done 17.

A challenging 200 page reading assignment for a class could balloon into a 1k+ page death march for me because I had not had any prior exposure to the foundation of the material.

The closest thing I got to exposure to national/international politics was CNN, C-SPAN, etc. (and my family didn't even have cable until I was in the 6th grade), while my classmates included a crown prince ('For fun I like to command my armies'... FFS...), a few princesses, Al Gore's son, etc.

The list goes on...

In all honesty, a school like Harvard is taking a fairly large gamble when they admit someone like me, because they are basically assuming that I will be able to overcome for a truly massive education deficit and still succeed and add value in classes that challenge people just as smart as (and often smarter than) me who've had the benefit of both the best education money can buy and numerous invaluable and truly remarkable life experiences.

Aside from pure resources advantage, it is a fact that IQ is strongly positively correlated to economic success. Regardless of where your views fall on the nature vs. nurture continuum, the children of the smart and wealthy have the greatest advantages according to either model.

The last, and probably greatest reason that for the disparity in admissions might be somewhat counterintuitive. It's easy and popular to think of rich kids as having been spoiled and handed everything in life, but in reality (at least at Harvard) the richer kids tend to have been intellectually challenged far more often and intensely than I had.

In grade/high school I almost invariably knew more at the start of the year than the class would cover by the end (I tested at post HS reading level while in the 3rd grade). The only subject for which this was not generally true was math during and after middle school, when the pace was merely frustratingly slow. By 6th grade or so, it became increasingly common that I knew more than the teacher.

While I was reading LotR in class as the teacher went over the multiplication tables for the 4th month in a row, many of my future peers were being pushed to the limit by the best private instructors and tutors. They were constantly challenged, and were thus taught the meta-lessons of how to attack and overcome intellectual challenges, as well as how personally rewarding it can be to do so.

I was taking the 'gifted' pre-algebra class in the 7th grade right around when my roommates and their friends were learning trig (and in one case, on the way to acing the AP Calculus B/C exam while auditing linear algebra at the local colle

Actually.....

[raehl]

Most Vegas games have house advantages in the 0.5% range. So you lose $0.50 of every $100 bet when using perfect strategy. (They make most of their money on people not using perfect strategy.)

You can do better than a 1% advantage, depending on the rules of the game, and if your buddy spent several hours losing at a 0.5% advantage betting the minimum, you can make up for that pretty fast even at a 1% advantage if you're betting the table limit.

But, it's a lot more complicated than just counting +1 / -1 and then betting more when the count is good, at least if you want to be GOOD at card counting. On top of just betting more, when you have good information about what cards are left, that also changes the 'right' actions in certain situations. For example, some hands that you always hit if you don't know what's in the chute may become hands you double-down instead. Some surrenders become stands. Some stands become hits. And looking at the table of 'perfect' blackjack strategy, the counts at which the 'right' move changes are different for each box. At a trivial level, instead of memorizing that you hit a 12 against a dealer's 3, you'd instead have to know that you hit a 12 against a dealers 3 when the count is less than (Whatever).

The REALLY big problems with making money counting cards are three-fold:

1) Counting cards is hard. So there is a big up-front investment in learning how to do it.

2) You have to bet big. When you bet big, you can still go on runs where you lose a LOT of money. Blackjack isn't a game where you bet $1,000 a hand and win $20 a hand. It's a game where you lose $1,000 a hand, sometimes win $1,000 a hand, occasionally win $2,000 a hand, semi-occasionally lose $2,000 a hand, and rarely win $2,500 a hand. But most hands you lose.

Two consequences of that:

- To make enough money to make it worth your time, especially if you're smart enough to count cards and could presumably put those talents towards a real job, you have to bet big. That means you have to have $1,000 a hand to bet.

- To bet big, you have to have enough of a bankroll that you can play over the long haul. At $1,000 a hand, you probably need $50,000 to have a chance, $100,000 to be reasonably sure, and you could STILL have a bad run and lose all of it, even with a 2-3% advantage.

I sometimes play blackjack on vacation, using perfect strategy, where the house has 0.55% advantage. Even betting $20/hand, my bankroll can swing $1,000 in the short term (over a period of hours). That works out to swings of $50,000 betting $1,000 a hand. Losing $50k is a pretty high risk for the money you're going to win counting cards.

3) If you are betting $1k a hand, and have $100,000, you get a lot of attention, and are not going to be around casinos very long if you keep winning. So you have a big initial investment (learning to count cards well) and a limited time to leverage that investment (until the casino figures out who you are)

Most people would be better off putting their money in a nice mutual fund.

But, soon those new machines that reshuffle the cards every hand will replace chutes and it'll be a moot point.

Re:Actually.....

[mabhatter654]

sounds like day trading on the stock market!

Re:Actually.....

[jorghis]

I agree with 90% of what you just said except for one part:

But, it's a lot more complicated than just counting +1 / -1 and then betting more when the count is good, at least if you want to be GOOD at card counting. On top of just betting more, when you have good information about what cards are left, that also changes the 'right' actions in certain situations. For example, some hands that you always hit if you don't know what's in the chute may become hands you double-down instead. Some surrenders become stands. Some stands become hits. And looking at the table of 'perfect' blackjack strategy, the counts at which the 'right' move changes are different for each box. At a trivial level, instead of memorizing that you hit a 12 against a dealer's 3, you'd instead have to know that you hit a 12 against a dealers 3 when the count is less than (Whatever). You are correct that you can gain a little bit of an advantage by adding a few more rules to basic strategy but I dont think that this makes it substantially harder. Memorizing that you hit a 12 on a dealers 3 when the count is less than X isnt much more difficult than the base case where you arent counting. Even if you are card counting you should never be doing math beyond basic arithmatic at the table. You dont need to understand all the math behind it to use basic strategy. You also dont need to understand all the math behind card counting to follow a slightly larger set of rules while card counting.

Re:Actually.....

[raehl]

You are correct that you can gain a little bit of an advantage by adding a few more rules to basic strategy but I dont think that this makes it substantially harder.

Clearly you're not taking enough advantage of the free beer when playing blackjack. Keeping track of basic strategy is hard!

Fortunately they let you use the chart, which makes life easier, and provides for maximum opportunities for making up for the house advantage with liquor consumption.

Re:Actually.....

[jscob]

If you find basic strategy hard, even after a few beers, then I feel sorry for you. You must be one of those 'math is hard' type of people. Turn in your geek card.

Basic strategy is easy.

Counting cards is mildly harder. If you find doing +1, -1 math in your head hard, along with basic division then turn in your geek card.

You do have to memorize a few more play tables for optimal play, depending on what system your using.

Since, in the US, we live in a country where using your brain at a level above watching tv is considered hard casinos like people who think they can count cards. They lose a lot more money than people who follow basic strategy.

Re:Actually.....

[jscob]

btw, I'm not saying that counting cards well is easy.

To do it well, it does take a lot of practice and you still need to rely on some luck in the casino

In life, the same generally applies to everything. To be successfull you need to understand what you are trying to accomplish, practice/work hard, and have a bit of luck.

Back to the counting thing, just because you can count cards doesn't mean you will win. You are just eliminating the house advantage and leaning it in your directions but the calculated odds are based on really large numbers so there is a chance that you could have your streak of losing hands eliminate your bankroll before you even see favorable conditions.

On the other hand, casinos play a really large number of hands so, regardless of short term deviations, the percentages, over the long term, are more likely to work out for them.

Re:Actually.....

[Dare nMc]

But, soon those new machines that reshuffle the cards every hand will replace chutes and it'll be a moot point.

thats already trivial, and already equivalent to video poker. Any casinos who still want gamblers like me, and my friends, who go to the tables occasionally and basically try to count cards at a $5 table, betting a max of $20 per hand and generally come out within $200 (usually within $50) per gambling evening at the casino. Will always offer decent chances to try and count, and throw out those who are overly successful.

Re:Actually.....

[raehl]

I can assure you I'm not a 'math is hard' type person. I'm a 'completely memorizing a table I can have a hard copy of' is a waste-of-time type person.

It's not him.

[spellcheckur]

As one of the players profiled in BDTH, I can say with authority that Bill Kaplan is definitively NOT the basis for the Mickey Rosa character in the book nor the character that Mr. Spacey plays on screen.

While I will not comment on any of the rest of Mr. Kaplan's claims, I will say that, following the release of the book, and especially given the success of the movie, there have been several people who may or may not have been active card players at that time that have come out to falsely claim that the book is about them.

Lest you suspect I may be one of them, I will point out that I was the one who submitted the original WIRED story to slashdot several years ago.

Re:It's not him.

[hey!]

I started MIT in 1979 and people often ask whether I knew anybody on the blackjack team. I answer not to my knowledge, although I was certainly aware that people were doing this.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think card counting wasn't exactly a closely held secret. I knew at least one guy who used to practice in one of the lounges, and was happy to explain various counting systems, some of which were easy enough for somebody who was not interested in spending hours on end memory training to master. Consequently practically everybody in my dorm knew about card counting and for the average MIT student knowing that it can be done is practically as good as telling him how to do it. I'd guess that there were probably a lot of freelancers.

The guy I'm talking about was almost definitely a freelancer. He used to play with his girlfriend, whose job it was to distract the manager by displaying her large breasts in a low cut dress.

People ask whether I did any card counting, and certainly with my friend's very cogent demonstrations of various systems I probably could have. However, it turns out casinos are my idea of Hell on Earth. I hate the noise, I hate the miasma of crookedness that hangs around them, but mostly I hate the company of stupid people blissed out on overstimulation and greed. I'm not saying everyone who goes there is stupid, but at any given time there are throngs of people in a casino who under no circumstances should be let into a house of gambling without being relieved of their credit cards.

The thing about this card counting guy was that he was weird, by MIT standards. What made him weird was that he really loved money. Plenty of people gloated about how much money they were going to make when the graduated, but really the money was just a way of keeping score on whose engineering balls were the biggest. This guy had zero interest in engineering, but he was taking one of the most difficult engineering courses MIT had to offer. He had no intention of ever practicing as an engineer, he had a plan to parlay his hard to get degree into serious amounts of money. He was a good enough guy, but like I said, weird.

So, I think there are a lot of people who could probably do this, and I'm sure some people tried it for the hack value, but you'd have to seriously like money, more than the average MIT student of my day, to do it systematically.

Still, in the atmosphere of mythologizing that's gone on since the book was published, I bet there's more than a couple people who can creatively reimagine themselves as the real star of the story.

Re:It's not him.

[Steve J 83]

I was under the impression that Mickey Rosa was a blend of John Chang and JP Massar. JP was on TV (with a very slightly obscured image) as 'Mr. Big' in a television show about blackjack a few years back.

Re:It's not him.

[Anonymous Coward]

I played on and invested in the MIT Blackjack Team in the early to mid 80's and, like most of the 80's players and investors, I invested in Strategic Investments, the limited partnership Kaplan formed in the early 1990's that grew the Team to its peak level.

As players on Kaplan's team, we made more money than we ever dreamed of, just for playing a game of blackjack he and his teammates taught us to win at. As investors, we typically achieved returns higher than today's top performing hedge funds and I only wish I had the same opportunity to do this again.

The book and the movie make winning at the game 1000 times easier than it actually is. If it were that easy to win, there would be hundreds of teams beating the casinos for millions day in and day out. The fact is it's almost impossible to fund, train, and manage a successful blackjack team.

As for whether Kaplan is the basis for the Mickey Rosa character, there was no one on the team fortunately that resembled this fictionalized, despicable character. Mezrich did state, however, in a recent Boston Globe article that the Rosa character was partially based on stories Mezrich had heard of Kaplan and a couple of his co-managers but, except for Rosa's line "We're running a business here, people," there's little else of this character or story line that rings true.

Re:It's not him.

[LuckyLouie]

I also played and invested in the Team, beginning in the early 1980's. Kaplan started the Team and laid out all of the strategies and ground rules, bringing on JP Massar to co-manage the Team once it grew to about 15-20 players. The Team took a respite in the latter part of the 80's and early 90's until Kaplan jumpstarted it again in 1992 by raising $1 million through a limited partnership. I understand Mezrich never interviewed Kaplan or Massar in writing "Bringing Down the House" but he did make up a character, Mickey Rosa, mostly fictionalized to add adventure to the story line and partially based on stories Mezrich had heard of Kaplan, Massar and others.

Re:It's not him.

[LuckyLouie]

The Rosa character is fictionalized. Kaplan started the team and then brought Massar on to run it with him in the early 1980's. Chang was trained by Kaplan and Massar a few years after the start of the Team. In 1992, Kaplan raised $1 million to get the MIT Blackjack Team rolling again. Massar helped oversee much of the player training and Chang acted frequently as one of the trip managers since he continued to travel to casinos and play at the tables. Rosa was supposed to be the founder and leader of the Team, who ran the Team as a business and retired a long time ago "when he was at the top." Nothing else about his character or story line bears any resemblance to the real players on the Team.

And this guy is on in?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah I doubt it. I actually do know one of the players and he is about as different from Doc as conceivable. Doc's post history is typical slashdot anti-corporate/fascist diatribe, while the guy I know is essentially a corporate fascist who joined a secret syndicate of con artists to scam money from schmucks.
The only thing bigger than his brain is his ego, and I guarantee you he would not associate with someone with as socialist a worldview as this poster.

Re:And this guy is on in?

[Doc Ruby]

What's funny is that one of the team's central members spent their college years as a funloving anarchist. And some of the other counters I know are much more "socialist" (actual socialists) than I am.

Wait, no, the really funny thing is that I blew off the chance to join the team because I was too busy making money with my SW development corporation. My main customers were banks and giant publishing companies, as well as state/provincial/federal governments, global telecom corps... Like, I wore a suit and shaved and everything! I hope they never guessed I was a commie, while I was making all that capitalist money with my corporation telling the government what to do.

Re:And this guy is on in?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are one confused puppy. Anarchists are exactly the opposite of socialist. And.. you think taking money from the goverment and wearing a suit is capitalist? This is practically the very definition of socialism. I don't think you have any idea what you are talking about.
Its clear to me you do not know these guys. You think you do. But you have demonstrated how easily confused you are.

Re:And this guy is on in?

[Doc Ruby]

No, you can't even keep it together enough to make sense from one post to another. You claimed I couldn't know the team because one person on it you claim you know is a corporate fascist. So I explained that someone I know on the team was a college anarchist. The point is that your possibly imaginary friend's fascism doesn't mean that my real friend's anarchism didn't exclude them from being on the team. They both wanted to make money counting cards, which is why they were happy to be on the team. Their politics didn't have anything to do with it.

Meanwhile, my politics (even though you've got them wrong) were even less relevant, because I didn't even join the team, though for completely nonpolitical reasons (I was busy making money another way). And let me tell you, as a capitalist (who amasses capital by trading in capital, often in the purest abstract terms like trading derivatives), I know that wearing a suit and taking money from the government are in fact some of the clearest marks of any capitalist. Socialism is when the government owns my capital, which isn't at all what I said.

So you have now executed a perfect demonstration of your own confusion, ignorance, and worthlessness in every possible subject you could mention. And I'm still rich, with some friends who ran a very lucrative and now famous blackjack team - and you're not.

Goodbye.

Re:And this guy is on in?

[KevinIsOwn]

Well, I have to say that with this post you've lost any credibility you may have had. So what if you're rich? Big fucking deal. If you're so confident about your story about knowing the MIT Black Jack guys stop bringing up the fact that you are rich, and just let the post live on its own. Your terrible defenses only destroy your credibility.

But I already know what your response to this will be- that you're richer than me. Well, maybe you are. I don't really care.

Re:And this guy is on in?

[Doc Ruby]

You just don't seem to understand that if the person to whom I were replying weren't poor, and therefore I might make some money off of them, then I might consider continuing to reply to them, even though there were no other reasons to talk with them - as I detailed. Which illustrates why I might, or anyone might, have been willing to play on the MIT blackjack team, even if we didn't respect the other players for their politics.

But hey, if all you can see is that I'm richer than them, even though you "really don't care", then there's no way you're going to understand something like that. And that limitation has nothing to do with how much money you've got.

A summary Bringing Down The House

[astro128]

Several years ago, right before the book can out, Wired Magazine (which we all know and love) featured a great story/ interview about "Kevin Lewis" (his name was changed in the article) and his story about being one of the MIT kids. It's a pretty good read, probably better than the movie. Follow the link below for the article.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vegas.html

---

Over 50% of the population is below average

Re:A summary Bringing Down The House

[Anonymous Coward]

And a /. article that has a link to the same page on wired:
MIT vs. Las Vegas
and that article was posted by timothy on 2002-08-14 8:22.

getting near 6 years since that article got posted.

Re:A summary Bringing Down The House

[zaffir]

I read that article both when it was originally posted to /. and just now, and I've been to the movie. The Wired piece is a thousand times more fascinating and entertaining than the film.

John Carmack .plan on blackjack

[drivers]

I remember that too.

I found this at this url (at the bottom)
http://doom-ed.com/blog/1998/09

In his 9/8/1998 update it says:

A few of us took a couple days off in vegas this weekend. After about
ten hours at the tables over friday and saturday, I got a tap on the shoulder...

Three men in dark suits introduced themselves and explained that I was welcome
to play any other game in the casino, but I am not allowed to play
blackjack anymore.

Ah well, I guess my blackjack days are over. I was actually down a bit for
the day when they booted me, but I made +$32k over five trips to vegas in the
past two years or so.

I knew I would get kicked out sooner or later, because I don't play "safely".
I sit at the same table for several hours, and I range my bets around 10 to 1.

Re:John Carmack .plan on blackjack

[trawg]

haha thanks! Good find; I had a quick look but couldn't see it anywhere.

Yeah....no.

[Xacid]

"To complicate matters further, most active Internet users have at least three separate e-mail addresses, which they give out for work purposes, for personal matters, and for newsletters and commercial offers. Somebody needs to sort it all out"

Somebody needs to sort it all out? Someone not me? No the fuck they don't. I divide my email addresses so ms granny-chain-a-lot spams one account and important shit goes elsewhere. I don't want companies to have an easier time finding me. Especially when 99.9% of them do *not* have my interests in mind as priority.

There's a right way and a wrong way to play BlackJ

[raehl]

And BTW, Blackjack is fun for most people; nothing really too mystical here for me when I play it (on rare occasions). Granted their are fools who may think otherwise and lose their lifesavings in turn. The right way is to use a printed table with Perfect Strategy (minimize losses), in Vegas (free drinks!) at the Wynn (fairly small house advantage), outside (fresh air) at the European-sunbathing (boobies!) pool, where there are only 12 tables (see cocktail waitress often = more free drinks!) that are right next to the bar (cocktail waitress travel distance is short = more free drinks!).

The wrong way would be to play "what feels lucky" (maximize losses) in Council Bluffs, IA (no free drinks) on a 6/5 blackjack table (big house advantage) on the floor (stale air, no boobies, senior citizens galor, annoying slot machine sounds, and infrequent cocktail waitress appearances.)

The one downside to the Wynn is you can't get to the pool unless you're a guest, and the rooms there are rather steep (but very very nice). You can mitigate that by losing a bunch of money when you play and then the rooms are not so steep anymore.

Re:There's a right way and a wrong way to play Bla

[QuantumG]

You don't have to lose, you just have to lay it down.

Go to a blackjack table and throw down $80,000. When they've finished giving you your chips, play 2 hands of $5 then go to the cash out window. Watch as they give you a free room for being a "high roller".

Long before this,

[onemorechip]

MIT professors Ed Thorpe (later of UCI) and Claude Shannon were developing blackjack strategies. Talk about shoulders of giants... Shannon of course is the famed father of information theory. Besides blackjack, these guys figured out how to gain an edge in roulette using some tricky electronics. Thorpe later made a fortune by founding one of the original hedge funds (this book is a fascinating account).

Here's how you get a free traffic from Slashdot

[ingo23]

1. Pick a movie from the top box office list
2. Mention that you looked like a main character when you was in college
3. Provide a 2 page detailed description of your business
4. Profit!

Re:Here's how you get a free traffic from Slashdot

[v(*_*)vvvv]

Ya. Mod this up. This is what I was about to say. Oh and by the way I am the CEO of the startup FreshAddress, which helps companies correct the outdated e-mail addresses in their customer databases.

The real money was made in the 1960s

[Animats]

The real money was made back in the 1960s, when the theoreticians figured out that blackjack was beatable but the gambling industry didn't know that yet.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Email churn

[seebs]

What he does is "epending" -- that is to say, trying to guess the "right" email address for someone who didn't give you that address.

Which is to say, providing dirty lists to spammers. You cannot do this right.

Re:There's a right way and a wrong way to play Bla

[Anonymous Coward]

The "right way" is to stay away from normal play. The New England casinos run various games, and when the tables are slow, they'll announce a change in the odds at a particular table to draw in players. You switch tables and play _there_, where the odds are better, and it helps your card counting quite a lot.

Did the books mention the blonde, big-buted Mormon girl Wendy form Senious House dorm at MIT who was on the team? She would wear slinky outfits and wildly changed hair colors and distract the pit bosses while the rest of the team played for hard money. She also had a real thing for motorcycles, and believed that sex didn't count as a sin if you were drunkk when you did it. (Her Mormon parents worried about the gambling, but it was paying her tuition. I don't think they knew about the drunk part.)

I had a Harley, and met her at the Steer Roast party at her dorm. There's nothing like a busty, happy blonde drunk out of her gourd and happy to have something rumbling between here legs, hanging on tightly and swaying from drunkenness. Her being a lot smarter than me and having plenty of money made it even better.

Doubtfull

[LLKrisJ]

But Boston-area Internet entrepreneur and real estate developer Bill Kaplan is saying that if anyone is the basis for Micky Rosa, it's him Most of the time, when people explicitly try to take credit like this, they couldn't be further from the truth... Just my 2 cents :)

Just read Chang's thesis and though it was....

[Anonymous Coward]

a piece of shit! Come on how can someone attending MIT write something like that and have it accepted?

Did anyone mention that card counting is bullshit?

[dgun]

Back in the 60's/early 70's before the game changed, card counting was effective. Casinos played with single decks, used favorable rules, and dealt down to the last few cards. In 2008? Please.

This movie and the book it was based on is essentially a shill for the gaming industry, in my opinion. Casinos clandestinely promote card counting because they know they make more money from people who try to count cards and who are convinced they have an edge on the casino. The myth of blackjack makes the casinos a lot of money.

Scratching out an edge with a reasonable spread, 1 check for negative counts 5-10 for positive counts, is all but impossible in a casino setting. Sure, a computer can do it churning out numbers, but there is a big difference.

And then there is the risk of ruin to consider. Even if you do create a small edge, without a tremendous bankroll to back you up risk of ruin is still almost certain against the house. And if you had a tremendous bankroll, then the slight mathematical edge possible at blackjack would be a foolish, risky investment completely not worth the effort.

Not in Vegas...

[Notquitecajun]

What some people probably don't realize as much is that Vegas is the wrong place to try all this, and probably Atlantic City. Hit up the Louisiana-Mississippi casinos, bet small, and don't go to the same place several times in a row. My understanding is that their systems are less sophisticated and dealers not as bright...so you won't get caught and can make more money. Cheaper to live down here, by the way.

ENOUGH OF THE HYPE about MIT team

[HEbGb]

Once again, everyone:

1. Card counting is NOT hard, nor does it take ANY math skill or special memorization ability. It does take practice to do effectively, but the whole MIT brainiac angle is 100% marketing for a book/movie.

2. Blackjack teams have been around for decades, running on exactly the same strategies as the folks from MIT *mimicked*. The MIT team DID NOTHING ORIGINAL. It's marketing, folks.

3. In the best of cases, card counting MIGHT sway your odds to about 1% favor, so it takes a LONG time and a huge bankroll to make any money.

4. The MIT team wasn't even that successful. Sure, they pulled in a few million, but once it's split up among them all, and when you consider the time and work involved, they would have done just as well, if not better, working regular jobs.

It's *entertainment*, people. Not non-fiction. Don't take it seriously. Enjoy the movie, but don't for a minute idolize these folks, or fall for the hype.

[ Yes, I know what I'm talking about, and used to play blackjack for fun, including counting. ]

Re:ENOUGH OF THE HYPE about MIT team

[PCMeister]

There is a ring of truth to this. Whenever there is a movie like this comes out, it's bound to stir up controversy as to its authenticity.

What I haven't seen posted is a discussion concerning the possibility of "teams" that were never caught, but can't claim credit as it would bring unwanted attention to themselves.

This reminds me of a quote from the movie "The Recruit":

"Our failures are known. Our successes...are not."
~Walter Burke (Al Pacino's character)

Re:Did anyone mention that card counting is bullsh

[HEbGb]

Not quite true. You can still count cards and win in today's casinos, and make money professionally, but it's by no means easy (and it really never was).

http://wizardofodds.com/

Of course, a lot of people THINK they can count cards, and lose their shirts. The casinos love that.

Hard to tell who Rosa is supposed to be....

[hal2814]

There really isn't a real equivalent from the source material 21 used. No, I'm not talking about some blackjack book. I'm talking about the real source material: Risky Business. That's where 21 got almost all of its plot material. They just made a few substitutions like hookers were replaced with gambling and Joey Pants was replaced with Cowboy Curtis and Princeton was replaced with Harvard Med. Wherever they didn't already have some plot worked out, they'd throw in a little MIT card counting stuff from a book they had lying around. Rosa doesn't really have an equivalent in Risky Business. I'd like to think that Rosa is Curtis Armstrong since Rosa is the one who gets the Joel... I mean Ben... involved but I guess he could also be Bronson Pinchot. I kind of imagine the Asian kid from 21 being Pinchot though. It's really hard to tell but I think Kaiser Soze is Booger, not Balkie.

Griffin list

[vinn01]

Once a casino has identified a person as a card counter, the person's name and likeness are immediately circulated on something called the Griffin list, which, I am told, has the power to keep people out of most casinos for the rest of their lives.

Re:There's a right way and a wrong way to play Bla

[tknd]

If I could lay down $80,000 like that I'd probably think the room is cheap.

Well? What's stopping you?

[encoderer]

The 2006 law regarding online gambling was not consumer facing: It's no more illegal now than it ever was before.

The law prohibits financial institutions from transferring money in and out of gambling accounts.

But there are about 999 ways around that. Among them:

1. Mailing a money order to the poker site
2. Using an intermediary such as ePassporte
3. For what it's worth, FullTilt still accepts my debit card :)

Sure it is. But it wasn't ALWAYS that way.

[encoderer]

Casinos, like all business, spend a healthy amount of time and money determining where they're losing money. And they put in place corrective actions to stem it.

The reason counting is so ineffective now is because it used to be profitable. There WERE dozens of teams, but we're talking 70's-90's.

Technology has helped casinos. But so has more than a few expose books written by people who did, literally, make millions from the casinos.

football

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:It's not him. Problems with hollywood & US

[davidsyes]

audiences...

So, as for one of the other characters, I'll repeat some my contribution from March 11:

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_(2008_film) [wikipedia.org]

I just a few weeks ago read in a copy of Asian Week how these smart AMERICAN Asians figured out a card counting method and raked in the coin from one or more casinos. Now, we've got hollyweird picking up on this and whitewashing the cast. Amazing the shit hollyweird does to calculate to obtain the best studio ticket intake.

From Wikipedia, from Asian Week and Ben Mezrich (author of the book):

"Casting of Caucasian/Asian

Although the four main characters in Bringing Down the House were Asian-Americans in real life, studio executives have cast mostly white actors to portray them in the film. Ben Mezrich, author of Bringing Down the House, has noted a "stereotypical" casting process on the part of Hollywood.[1] In the book, Mezrich explicitly states that a young Caucasian betting large amounts of money stands out, while a young Asian or other minority would be less conspicuous. Asian Week called the casting a "whitewash," pointing out that if it were African Americans replaced by Caucasians, there would be more vocal protest.""

Re:There's a right way and a wrong way to play Bla

[geekoid]

Since I understand probability, playing the 'Perfect Strategy' is what feels lucky to me.

Heh, I do enjoy playing to annoy other players. Specifically obnoxious players.

I watched a guy get so mad he almost turned purple when I split tens.
Totally worth the measly 4 dollar risk.
For the record, I got a 8 and a 5...the dealer had 16 and busted because I took the 5.
Totally coincidental, I know.

Dealer would have busted anyway.

[raehl]

For the record, I got a 8 and a 5...the dealer had 16 and busted because I took the 5.

You took the 5, AND the 8. If you'd just stayed on the 20 like you were 'supposed' to, dealer would have gotten the 8 and busted anyway.