MIT Blackjack Game: Card Counting and Main Rules. If you want to play some unusual game, which will give you a possibility to show all your skills and get a lot of money – think of playing blackjack! The most popular and playable casino card game online blackjack. The MIT Blackjack Team was a group of students and ex-students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, and other leading colleges who used card counting techniques and more sophisticated strategies to beat casinos at blackjack worldwide. The MIT Blackjack Team was a group of students and ex-students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and other leading colleges who used card counting techniques and more sophisticated strategies to beat casinos at blackjack worldwide.
Arts + EntertainmentYou too can win a fortune counting cards. Probably.
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For most people, gambling is a fast way to lose money while slurping down free (well, sort of free) drinks. But for a few years in the 1980s, Bill Kaplan and a few associates figured out a way to clean house and rake in cash, and thus, the legend of the MIT Blackjack Team was born. Helmed by Kaplan (who didn’t actually go to MIT), the MIT team used card counting and a strict system to carve out an advantage against the dealer that they ruthlessly exploited. With the Encore Boston Harbor Casino throwing open its doors, I wondered: Do you have to be an MIT-level genius to pull off a scheme like this, or can any schlub with a will to learn and dollar signs in his eyes make do? Kaplan was kind enough to hop on the phone and break down just what it takes to beat the house.
(The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
You founded the MIT Blackjack Team, which became famous for beating casinos and winning huge amounts of money. How did that all start?
When I first got out of college—I went to Harvard—I was supposed to go right into Harvard Business School. Scr888 casino download apk free download for android. Instead, I deferred for a year, moved out to Vegas, and started a blackjack team. The thing about blackjack is that you can actually win at this game. So, I ran a team for a year, and kept running it while I was in business school. Eventually though, everyone was burned out, all the casinos knew our faces. And at some point, I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge talking about all this and some MIT kids came over said, “Are you talking about blackjack? We’ve been playing for a few months, trying to make money.”
Okay, but how did you get into blackjack at all?
I read this book by Edward O. Thorp called Beat the Dealer. He said if you crunched all the numbers, the game actually could be beaten, if you kept to a certain system. My background was in stats, applied math, and computer science, and I was curious: How can you win at a game that casinos win billions of dollars at?
So how do you do it?
Counting cards lets you see whether the player or the casino has the odds, and then you use a betting strategy, how much you can bet on each hand. Card counting tells you how to optimally play each hand, based on what cards are remaining in the shoe and your expected advantage. Then, there’s a whole money management piece of it.
Was there something that set the MIT team apart?
Most teams fail on the money management. They never make it to the long run.
Let’s say we’re flipping a quarter with a 51 percent chance of landing on one side. If you’re betting a dollar on each flip, but you only have five dollars to your name, you’re going to get wiped out. So, there’s a whole piece of how much you should be betting so you can not get wiped out. If I play 10,000 hands, it’ll show me the advantage.
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Is this something that you need to be an MIT genius to figure out, or do you think me and the BoMag staff can put together a team?
Honestly, just about anyone with a high school education can learn the game. It just happened to be, everyone on the team was from Harvard, MIT, Princeton, University of Chicago. You could teach someone—there eventually were a couple of people who played on the team who just had a high school education. It’s not that difficult. Doing all the strategy and money managing can be pretty tough, but as a player, it’s just some memorization.
What if I tried to give it a go on my own?
It’s hard to do, as an individual. One of the reasons you play as a team, you can pool all your capital, but you’re able to get to the long run sooner. As a player, your advantage is about one percent. If you’ve got 30 people playing and putting in eight hours, playing in accordance with the guidelines, you get to the long run that much faster.
Did you ever get kicked out of a casino?
At every casino, eventually you get kicked out. By the time we were playing, most were public companies. If you saw [casino staff] coming, they’d say, “Go play somewhere else, you can’t play blackjack here anymore.” There were some people, not on our team, who got roughed up. Casinos did a bunch of things that were illegal back then. They’d steal our money out of safety deposit boxes, for instance, and we’d have to hire lawyers to get it back.
Did you ever try to beat another game?
Blackjack is the only game that you can legitimately beat. If you play basic strategy, you only have a half percent disadvantage. If you count the cards, the advantage switches to the player, even though the odds are switching and moving as the cards are being played out. It’s the only one you can really win.
What made the MIT team so good?
There are tens of thousands of people who tried to win at the game, but MIT was the only team who really won year over year, because we ran it like a business. Training, extensive training, checkout procedures, two hours of perfect play, leaving the table right. It was really run more tightly than most businesses.
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MIT Blackjack Team: Big brains win big bucks
What began as a simple student pastime to unwind after grueling courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology evolved over the 1990s into a legendary run on the blackjack tables of Las Vegas.
Known as the MIT Blackjack Team, this rotating group of students and former students pulled off probably the most amazing run of blackjack winnings in the history of contemporary gaming. Some casinos estimate that the MIT Team won in excess of $5 million in more than 10 years of playing blackjack.
MIT Blackjack Team
The MIT Blackjack Team has since been immortalized in books such as Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich, a documentary Breaking Vegas and the blackjack movie 21, directed by Oscar® winner Kevin Spacey. In the beginning, however, the team was little more than a bunch of college guys getting together to drink beer and play cards.
In this case, the game was blackjack, and given that these students and former students were some of the country's brightest mathematicians and engineers, it's not really surprising that their pastime evolved into experiments in the science of probabilities. After all, calculating probabilities was what led a math whiz of an earlier generation, Edward O. Thorp, to develop the card-counting systems written up in his 1963 and 1966 editions of his book, Beat the Dealer.
Soon, however, the MIT students' fun turned serious, as the team began refining a blackjack strategy and practicing at casino simulations set up in apartments and warehouses around Boston. Just like the legendary 'Master of Blackjack' Ken Uston and the teams he assembled during the 1980s, the MIT Blackjack Team constructed fake casinos and ran through various scenarios. Team members were required to learn to count cards while being harassed by pit bosses typical of those found in Las Vegas casinos.
The team first honed its skills in real-world games in Boston's Chinatown. Then it began casting about for investors willing to bankroll the team's forays into Las Vegas gambling. Those willing to risk their money on MIT brains often were rewarded far beyond their hopes. One investors' group reportedly earned a 154 percent profit on its investment!
According to various sources, the MIT Team tried several card counting systems and improved upon them. Among other techniques, they were the first to use 'Ace Tracking' and 'Shuffle Tracking' methods to boost their odds.
For instance, 'Ace Tracking' involved counting in such a way to determine when a 'plus' of aces would appear, a situation that could boost their odds of winning by as much as 35 percent. Ace Tracking was tied to the 'Shuffle Tracking' theory, which contends that casinos push for fast turnover on blackjack games so that dealers are hard-pressed to shuffle decks thoroughly. As a result, small packets of cards may not be sufficiently mixed up, a situation that can lead to a 'plus' of aces. In addition, Shuffle Tracking also was the foundation of the MIT Team's ability to predict when certain subsets of high-value and low-value cards were in play.
These arcane techniques gave the MIT Blackjack tremendous tools for beating the house. However, the team also coupled their mathematical skills with a people strategy that nearly blew away the casinos.
First, casinos typically expected big-money blackjack players to be middle-aged white men. However, most of the MIT Team members were Asians and Mediterraneans such as Greeks, Italians, Lebanese or Saudis. In addition, a good number of the MIT players were women, typically discounted as big-money players. Often team members would pretend to be the sons and daughters of oil sheiks or rich foreign businessmen, the spoiled, well-heeled partiers whose money casinos were eager to take.
Second, the MIT Team's mix of racial-ethnic and gender identities flew under the radar of the casinos' surveillance, including that of the dreaded Griffin Books ('mug books' of card counters and other undesirables assembled for the casinos by Griffin Investigations Inc.).
Mit Blackjack Game
Finally, however, it was the playing strategy of the MIT Team that enabled it to scoop up thousands of dollars at a time. In short, playing as a team, rather than as individuals, allowed the MIT team members each to concentrate on a certain skill, relying on their teammates to keep up with the action.
The MIT Team consisted of three types of players, called Spotters, Gorillas and Big Players. The Spotter was the scout. He or she kept to the minimum wagering limit at the blackjack table and simply counted the cards. When the Spotter calculated that the cards were in the team's favor, he or she signaled to other members to move in on the table.
The Gorilla only played. He or she picked up the Spotter's signal and came into the game with large amounts of money. The Gorilla also was a performer. He or she dressed like a high roller, often appeared to be drunk, and was always lavish with bets and tips. In other words, the Gorilla used the casino's own high-roller psychology against it. The Gorilla always quit when the Spotter signaled the odds had rolled back to the house's favor.
The Big Player was the MIT Team's elite weapon, a teammate who could both wager and count cards at the same time. The Big Player had mastered some of blackjack's advanced wagering strategies, knowing when to Double Down, Split Pairs and Double after Splitting. Casinos were convinced that card counters had to concentrate so much on counting that they didn't have the brainpower to master these playing strategies as well. Once again, MIT was using the casino's own preconceptions against it.
Eventually, Griffin Investigations and the casinos began to realize what was going on. Some MIT'ers were identified and barred, but new crops of players took their places. Once the connection to MIT was made, the Griffin agency simply acquired MIT yearbooks and added students' photos to its mug books.
In 1997 the original team split. However, the split was more like a one-celled organism dividing itself to reproduce. While some of the MIT Team members retired to live off their portions of the winnings, others continued to play into the early 21st century. Finally, casinos knew even the second and third generations of MIT teams, and their decade-long run was over.
But what a legendary blackjack ride it had been!
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