Doug Ross @ Journal

Hacking Las Vegas

Recently read the entertaining non-fiction tome Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. The entire story can be found in abridged form online at the Wired site.

For six years in the 1990s, Lewis was a principal member of the MIT Blackjack Team, an infamous cabal of hyper-geniuses and anarchistic whiz kids who devised a method of card counting that took the gaming world completely by surprise. Funded, in part, by shadowy investors and trained in mock casinos set up in classrooms, dingy apartments, and underground warehouses across Boston, Lewis and his gang used their smarts to give themselves an incredible advantage at the only truly beatable game in the pit. A baby-faced card-counting team possessed with impressive mathematical skills — here was a novelty that turned blackjack into an arbitrage opportunity. Their system was so successful, it took nearly two years before the casinos began to catch on — engaging in a cat-and-mouse war with the well-trained MIT conspirators.

To the casinos, there's no difference between legal card counters like Lewis, who use their brains to beat the game, and the brash, increasingly high tech cheaters who steal tens of millions of dollars from the resorts every year. In response, the casinos have developed equally sophisticated means of identifying, tracking, and eliminating their enemies: i.e., anyone who doesn't consistently lose.

Hacking Las Vegas