This weeks whim book purchase was Amazon.com: Books: Bringing Down the House : The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. Apparently MIT has a long history of blackjack players, and this book details a particular team which aggressively used card counting, team play, shuffle tracking and other aggressive techniques to win over three million dollars from Las Vegas casinos.

In the late 80s to early 90s I went through a brief love affair with blackjack, egged on by books such as
Thorp’s Beat the Dealer (still an excellent read) and Griffin’s Theory of Blackjack. I never really graduated to a real card counter, being content to slowly give my money to the casinos by using Basic Strategy.

What’s really amazing about this tale isn’t the techniques they used (only really sketched at a high level in the book, refer to Thorp or Griffin for the mathematically inclined) but just how aggressively they used these techniques, and how long it took the casinos to catch on. Ultimately team play requires a number of spotters who play at tables and bet constantly, perhaps even playing basic strategy while keeping track of
counts. When the counts go positive, the spotters signal
"Gorillas" and "Big Players" who come
in and bet large until the count goes cold.

To me it seems rather obvious that if you reviewed tapes of big winners employing this strategy, you’d begin to see familiar faces around the table. If the casinos employed
their own card counters, they’d also be particularly wary
of anyone entering mid-deck during positive counts.

And yet this isn’t how the casinos finally figured it out. I won’t
spoil the book by telling you about how the team eventually became "dinosaurs" (banned from casino play),
but the book has just as much to say about the interactions of people as it does cards.

A fun read. I burned through it in an evening.