Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
Search in google:
It's Friday night and you're on a red-eye to the city of sin. Strapped to your chest is half a million dollars; in your overnight bag is another twenty-five thousand in blackjack chips; and your wallet holds ten fake IDs. As soon as you land in Las Vegas, you are positive you are being investigated and followed. To top it all off, the IRS is auditing you, someone has been going through your mail — and you have a multivariable calculus exam on Monday morning. Welcome to the world of an exclusive group of audacious MIT math geniuses who legally took the casinos for over three million dollars — while still finding time for college keg parties, football games, and final exams.In the midst of the go-go eighties and nineties, a group of overachieving, anarchistic MIT students joined a decades-old underground blackjack club dedicated to counting cards and beating the system at major casinos around the world. While their classmates were working long hours in labs and libraries, the blackjack team traveled weekly to Las Vegas and other glamorous gambling locales, with hundreds of thousands of dollars duct-taped to their bodies. Underwritten by shady investors they would never meet, these kids bet fifty thousand dollars a hand, enjoyed VIP suites and other upscale treats, and partied with showgirls and celebrities.Handpicked by an eccentric mastermind — a former MIT professor and an obsessive player who had developed a unique system of verbal cues, body signals, and role-playing — this one ring of card savants earned more than three million dollars from corporate Vegas, making them the object of the casinos' wrath and eventually targets of revenge. Here is theirinside story, revealing their secrets for the first time.Master storyteller Ben Mezrich takes you from the ivory towers of academia to the Technicolor world of Las Vegas, where anything can happen — and often does. Bringing Down the House launches you into the seedy underworld of corporate Vegas — deep into the realm of back rooms, ever-present video cameras, private investigators, and the threats and tactics of pit bosses and violent heavies. Equipped with twenty different aliases and disguises, the group of young card counters struggles around these roadblocks to live the high life — until one fateful day when Vegas violently follows them home to Boston. Suddenly, there can be no more hiding behind false identities; the high life folds like a bad hand of cards.Filled with tense action and incredibly close calls, Bringing Down the House is a real-life mix of Liar's Poker and Ocean's Eleven — and it's a story Vegas doesn't want you to read. Publishers Weekly "Shy, geeky, amiable" MIT grad Kevin Lewis, was, Mezrich learns at a party, living a double life winning huge sums of cash in Las Vegas casinos. In 1993 when Lewis was 20 years old and feeling aimless, he was invited to join the MIT Blackjack Team, organized by a former math instructor, who said, "Blackjack is beatable." Expanding on the "hi-lo" card-counting techniques popularized by Edward Thorp in his 1962 book, Beat the Dealer, the MIT group's more advanced team strategies were legal, yet frowned upon by casinos. Backed by anonymous investors, team members checked into Vegas hotels under assumed names and, pretending not to know each other, communicated in the casinos with gestures and card-count code words. Taking advantage of the statistical nature of blackjack, the team raked in millions before casinos caught on and pursued them. In his first nonfiction foray, novelist Mezrich (Reaper, etc.), telling the tale primarily from Kevin's point of view, manages to milk that threat for a degree of suspense. But the tension is undercut by the first-draft feel of his pedestrian prose, alternating between irrelevant details and heightened melodrama. In a closing essay, Lewis details the intricacies of card counting.
Acknowledgments91112Boston, Present Day163Boston, June 1994264Atlantic City, June 1994365Boston, September 1994666Boston, October 1994817Boston, October 1994958Las Vegas, Present Day1059Thirty Thousand Feet, November 199411710Las Vegas, November 199412811Weston, MA, Thanksgiving 199415412The Double Life, 1994-9516413Chicago, May 199518014Boston, June 199519115Foxwoods Casino, Present Day20216July 1995 to October 199521317Boston, Halloween 199522518Boston, November 199523219Las Vegas, Present Day25620Las Vegas, Fall 199726721Boston, Fall 199728722Las Vegas, Present Day30323Boston, Valentine's Day 199831324Las Vegas, President's Day 199831925The Bayou: Shreveport, LA, 199832926Boston, Spring 199834527Boston, Spring 199835028Boston, Spring 199836029Boston, Spring 199837330Las Vegas, Memorial Day 199838531Boston, June 199839232Las Vegas, Hard Rock, Present Day402How to Count Cards and Beat Vegas411
