Sunday, December 01, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

CARD COUNTING: Creating Their Luck

MIT students use their math skills to reap large rewards from Las Vegas casinos

Illustration by David Stroud. 'Bringing Down the House' by Ben Mezrich

See all those big buildings, up and down the Strip, lining the streets of downtown and sprinkled throughout the suburbs? They wouldn't be there if the house didn't have a decided edge.

So "Bringing Down the House" brings to life every gambler's dream. It's subtitled "The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions." And that, apparently, is precisely what they did.

"It was amazing," said author Ben Mezrich. "These were geeky kids back in Boston. When they hit Las Vegas, it was this sort of corporation. They lived like rock stars. To watch them spread out across the blackjack floor and play their tag team ... was wild."

His book details the mid- to late-'90s exploits of the students and former students, all math whizzes and all adept, as well, at turning themselves into other people. The team consisted of five men and one woman, although there was some shifting from time to time. Recruited and bankrolled -- with the help of silent partners, who enjoyed returns of about 12 percent -- by an older version of themselves who'd already worn out his welcome at the casinos, they perfected and elaborated on the decades-old practice of card counting.

Here's how it worked -- extremely simplified: One student would settle in at a blackjack table and keep his or her eye on the cards coming out of the shoe, repeatedly betting table minimum. When the student's card-counting system indicated the odds were good for beating the dealer -- when, for example, a lot of face cards were left in the shoe -- a signal would go to another member of the team. He or she, known as the "Big Player," would arrive with a fat bankroll and take advantage of the hot deck, placing big bets and reaping even bigger profits, until the deck turned cold.

It was a complex system.

"They don't just count cards these days," said Anthony Curtis, publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor and Huntington Press and himself a former card counter and team player. Modern teams, he said, employ "shuffle tracking, ace tracking, sequencing ... which all are in the category of advantage play."

Card counting is not illegal, but casinos who catch someone doing it -- or anything else they consider cheating, or in some way wrong -- can ask the person to leave the premises. Curtis explained it's like making a bet with a friend: It takes two people to wager, and if the other person chooses not to, you don't have a bet.

But if blackjack is all about trying to beat the dealer's hand, is it cheating?

"It's been beaten into the heads of some of these people that card counting is a form of cheating," Curtis said. "It's not. Card counting is a method of using your intellect, playing the game according to the rules, playing it on a higher level.

"The smarter ones who know it's not cheating simply don't want to deal to players who can beat them."

A man who uses the pseudonym Kevin Lewis was one of the players from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team.

"To be honest," he said, "I got involved initially because I thought it was fun to hang out with my friends in Vegas. I got into it more when I saw how lucrative it was. There was nothing else I could do at that age -- 21 -- to do that well financially."

The students were taking huge sums out of the casinos. Gordon Adams, manager of Griffin Investigations, cited a card-counting team's take at one casino of $400,000 in two days, and, Adams said, "that could be average."

Also part of the allure for the MIT team members: The cloak-and-dagger drama of bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars to town concealed in their clothing and a level of luxury and excitement that contrasted starkly with the halls of academia.

Lewis, who's 29 now, said the fun lasted for about 18 months. Initially, some of the casinos treated the students like the successful young businessmen or sons of Asian millionaires they pretended to be. But eventually it became clear that while they were spending big, they were taking home even more.

In the book -- in which pseudonyms are sprinkled among well-known casino names -- the students eventually are foiled by the Las Vegas detective agency Plymouth Associates, another pseudonym.

"Yeah, that's us," Adams said. "We got MIT yearbooks and went back and found their photos. That's how we figured out that most of these people were coming out of MIT. That also helped us identify them."

Once they'd been identified, it became much more difficult for them to execute their card-counting scheme at casinos that were Griffin clients. Photos and descriptions of the students were distributed. The eyes in the sky were ready.

"There was one time at a casino in Las Vegas where I went up to the table and immediately they're sort of staring at me," Lewis said.

The MIT team members were among the most organized to hit local casinos, but they weren't the first.

"The first notable team was the Ken Uston team," Curtis said, adding that it was Uston's people who came up with the Big Player concept.

During the past couple of decades, Curtis said, MIT has been a "hotbed of blackjack research. MIT was just a place where a lot of people early on were learning about blackjack and card counting and learning about these systems."

Nor would the MIT team be the last.

"The Greeks are going strong right now," Curtis said. "Core, the Hyland team. There are bunches of them. There have been lots of different players. They all do essentially the same thing, which is take a very organized approach to getting the money from casinos.

"It's not just a couple of card counters that become pals. It's a couple dozen card counters -- precise and choreographed approaches to beating casinos."

Lewis, who today works for an Internet company as a chief technology officer, said most of his teammates have gone legit. But the character called Martinez in the book still is counting cards -- and being identified and getting tossed out of casinos.

Why does he do it?

"It's a question we ask ourselves all the time," Lewis said. "That's who he is; he's a blackjack player. He'll do it until he's sucked every last dollar out of it. He doesn't want to go out and get a real job."

Lewis said that at times when he was playing with the MIT team, he felt fear. He remembers being identified at the Rio.

"You need to come over here with us," he remembers a security officer telling him. "I said, `Listen, there's a lot of casinos here, there's a lot of patrons. If you guys don't want my action here, I'll leave. I don't want any trouble.' He said, `OK, if you don't want any trouble.' "

And they didn't take their act only to Las Vegas. Lewis remembers being followed off a casino boat in Shreveport, La.

"They were trying to scare the crap out of me, and it definitely worked," he said.

Debi Nutton, vice president of casino operations for MGM Grand, is straightforward in her assessment of team gambling. Card counting is wrong, she said, "because we want to play the game where we have at least a slight advantage. A skilled card counter can take away that advantage."

The type of perks given to big players such as MIT team members cut into the casino's profits even more, she added.

Alan Feldman, senior vice president of public affairs for MGM Mirage, noted that casino games are "intended to be played under a certain set of rules. Everyone at the table should have knowledge that the rules are being adhered to equally by everyone.

"We view card counting as manipulation of the game, much in the same way a person who marks cards is manipulating the game."

And Feldman said it isn't just the counting of the cards that's viewed as a problem.

"The notion here is that you wager a given amount for a period of time and if the shoe becomes rich, then you start dramatically increasing your bet," he said. For "someone who wants to try to count the cards to determine possible outcome but who continues the same betting pattern, nothing will change" on the part of the casino.

Technology is making things easier -- for both sides.

"The automatic card shufflers make it far more difficult for card counters," Feldman said. "That cuts down on it a lot."

"Compared to when we were doing it, it's a hard thing to do anymore," Lewis said. "The places that you can play blackjack on a meaningful level -- that don't have automatic shuffle machines, that will take the action -- there's not many places that will do that anymore."

Card counters have as a result become less common, Feldman said, but "what's becoming more common is they're becoming more sophisticated in use of technology. We've found card counters who have little computers strapped to the inside of their thigh, or the inside of their leg, and they'll be keeping count by tapping their knees together."

Adams said technology has "helped us very much. It's shortened the turnaround time for getting information out."

Among the innovations, he said, is the Griffin Online Database, or GOLD, which casinos can access through the Internet.

It used to be, he said, the company had to print and distribute hand-held fliers identifying card counters, which could take two days.

"I can put out an alert now and they can have it in 10 minutes," he said.

Face-recognition technology also is being used, he noted.

While researching the book, Mezrich got a close look at the life of a card counter.

"We all got kicked out of The Mirage at one point, which was kind of an interesting experience," he said. "I wasn't exactly afraid. I knew what the process was: Big guys swarm around you.

"It doesn't seem fair that you should get kicked out for using your brain. But I can see the casino's point -- they have a game that can be beat and they don't want it to be beat."

Mezrich said Kevin Spacey has optioned the rights to the book.

"MGM Studios, ironically enough, is the one who bought it," he said. "So it'll be filmed in some of the same casinos we got kicked out of."