Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
by Ben Mezrich
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Free Press: 18 September 2002. Hardcover: 272 pages. ISBN-10: 0-74322-570-8 ISBN-13: 978-0743225700 Suggested retail price: $26.00 (US) Tags: Biography; blackjack; Boston, Massachusetts; gambling; Las Vegas; M.I.T.; Thriller Tactical strength: [6/10] |
Intrigued by the 2008 movie 21 directed by Robert Luketic, I decided to read Bringing Down the House. For the most part, the movie sticks with the basic events in the book. Kevin Lewis, a bright, young M.I.T. student has a couple of friends, Fisher and Martinez, that have dropped out of school but always seem to have plenty of cash. Kevin's friends recruit him to join their Blackjack team.
Kevin does a bunch of research and learns that several M.I.T. professors and others have run calculations that by playing a basic card counting strategy, that a single player can have a two percent advantage over the house. Kevin remains sceptical since to make much money at all with a two percent profit would take either lots of time or lots and lots of money. The leader of the team, Mickey Rosa, explains that Kevin's scepticism works for single players, but that when you engage an entire team, you can average a 20-30% profit. In addition, team play camouflages the card counting.
Since the casinos know all about the basic strategy, they can easily spot an individual card counter and usually ask the player to leave the casino. Rosa's development of team play puts players called "spotters" at several tables who play the minimum bet and keep a running count of the cards. When the deck gets hot, the spotters signal a big player to move in and start making big bets. The profits of the big players make more than compensates for the slight losses the spotters take.
The system works well for a while, but then some of the casinos start sharing information about card counters, and the team finds that they get banned from a casino almost as soon as they begin playing. Micky finds out that someone on the team sold a list of all the M.I.T. players (including other teams Micky financed) to a private investigation firm for $25,000. For a while disguises fool the casinos, and the team continues to make a profit. But soon even the disguises don't fool the casinos as the casinos employ the latest face- and gait-recognition technology.
For Kevin, gambling was just part of a dual life he lead on weekends. He graduated from M.I.T. and got a regular job with some sort of investment firm. He didn't need to gamble to support himself. After Kevin gets audited by the I.R.S. and one of the team members has his house ransacked and his safe containing $70,000 stolen, Kevin decides to give up professional gambling.
Mezrich's book does read more like a thriller than non-fiction. He does an excellent job at educating the reader about the complexities of both card counting and casino countermeasures without making the information boring. In real life, Kevin just stops professional gambling, which doesn't feel like the proper ending to a thriller. So after reading the fast-paced chapters, the conclusion feel like a letdown, which probably explains why the movie deviates from the book by creating several additional subplots.
Early on in the book, Kevin breaks up with his girlfriend at M.I.T. and he never falls for one of the female members of the Blackjack team as the movie portrays. Also, the movie presents Kevin as a poor kid looking for a way to pay for medical school, and that at one point Kevin had all of his money stolen. In fact, Kevin declared all his gambling income and kept all his money in the bank. In the movie, it didn't make sense to me that people smart enough to go to M.I.T. would not at least keep their cash in a safe deposit box. The movie also resolves the question of who betrayed the team and creates a revenge subplot to bring the movie to a more traditional ending for a thriller.
The reprint of Bringing Down the House as a movie tie-in adds an epilogue where Mezrich interviews Kevin for some additional information about how the book affected Kevin's life. Kevin never told his parents about his second life as a professional gambler. To tell his parents, Kevin gives them a copy of the book. Even though this extra information helps bring extra closure to Kevin's story, the tone just extends the slow let down of the original ending.
The movie does a good job at recreating the emotional tension that Mezrich develops in the book. So, unless you have a keen desire to know the "true story," I think that the movie does in two hours what it takes the book 300 pages to produce. The book gives details like the fact that team gambles all over the country and not just in Vegas, but the movie condenses the emotional states that Mezrich wanted to convey into a much more intense experience.
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