The MIT Blackjack Team

Possibly the best known of all advantage player groups, the MIT blackjack team's exploits entered the wider public consciousness on the back of the (loosely) non-fictional best seller by Ben Mezrich, 'Bringing Down the House and more recently the Hollywood film '21' based on Mezrich's book.

While both Mezrich's book and the film take a significant degree of poetic license on the interpretation of the facts surrounding the team's successes in Vegas and Atlantic City, nobody disputes that at their height, they were feared by casinos and won plenty at the blackjack tables.

Never before (and perhaps never since) had such a systematic and ruthless onslaught been unleashed on casino blackjack tables.

How it all began

In 1979 a group of students at MIT held an Independent Activities Period course named "How to Gamble if You Must" - a kind of tutorial into the mathematics behind blackjack and associated counting techniques.  J.P. Massar was one of a small group who took to Atlantic City that Spring eager to test their theories at the tables with real money.

This initial excursion was apparently a bit of a disaster, but determined to succeed, and encouraged by a new New Jersey Casino Control Commission ruling making it illegal for Atlantic City casinos to ban card counters, and $5,000 in stake capital from an unnamed investor they took to the tables soon after.  This time moderate success was had.

Enter Bill Kaplan

A year after the group's initial Atlantic City adventure, J.P. Massar met Bill Kaplan, a Harvard MBA graduate who had been running a successful counting team in Vegas for almost three years.  Massar was keen to tap Kaplan's successful model and Kaplan, encouraged by the potential of mentoring bright young MIT students while at the same time losing many of his original team members to inevitable casino heat, agreed to accompany the MIT group on one of their Atlantic City escapades.

While the trip was another financial failure, due largely to what Kaplan observed as inconsistent and overly complex counting methods being employed with no coherent group structure, he did see potential in the group undertook to back them provided he could run the team as a well structured business venture.  Backed by an initial capital stake of $89,000 which came from player contributions and outside investors, rigorous accounting practices and a team counting methodology, the team doubled this stake within ten weeks.  Players were rewarded just over $80 per hour played, while investors took a annualized return equal to 250%.

The MIT blackjack team was born.

Over ensuing years, the team would grow to include as many as 80 players, with up to 30 operating simultaneously in casinos around America at certain times.  Operated as an incorporated partnership, with  stake capital in the millions, this was a serious business making a lot of money at casino' expense.  It wasn't long before Kaplan was unable to enter any casino in Vegas without a security team immediately being assigned to follow him and try to identify his team members.

Counting in Teams

What really separated the MIT blackjack team from anything casinos had experienced date, aside from the sheer size and military-like precision of the operation, was the fact that rather than playing individually, team members worked together with cleverly assigned roles to avoid classic casino counting detection methods.  Team counting was the brainchild of blackjack legend Al Francesco, but these guys took it to a new level of magnitude.

A card counter playing in isolation is easily detected by casinos as their bet patterns will usually betray the fact that they are counting.  Relatively small bets during the early parts of a shoe's deal followed a sudden increase in bet amounts in the event that the count suggests a hot shoe, will very soon tip security off that a counter is playing.

Where the MIT team had casinos bamboozled, is that rather than the same person playing and counting, they had counters assigned to watch (not sit at or play) at tables and give signals as soon as the shoe was hot.  Then in would come the team member assigned the roll of the high roller, and they would immediately bet big, knowing that the count was on, but not showing any bet pattern other than an aggressive player from the first bet to the last...impossible to detect.

Offshoots

Inevitably casinos stepped up their vigilance to combat the MIT blackjack team and invested heavily in high tech security such as facial recognition software and eventually the heat got the better of many of the original members of the team.  The party came to an end in 1994 with the dissolution of Strategic Investments, the team's investment vehicle.

But a number of members went on to start up successful teams of their own.  Two of the better known offshoots were  the Amphibians lead by Semyon Dukach, and the Reptiles lead by Mike Aponte.

Being in the business of taking money from casinos, these guys don't exactly advertise their operations, and there are no doubt plenty more members of the original team happily plundering casinos around the world.

And good luck to them I say!

To read more about the MIT blackjack team, visit Wiki

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