Odds Man Outed - MIT Card Counters Nearly Beat Casinos (Review)
For years, casinos around the world have paid armies of security experts millions to stop waves of computer nerds from MIT from using their brains to win big bucks at blackjack.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have any animosity towards casinos,” says Semyon Dukach, one of the most successful players from a first generation of MIT’s big bucks blackjack winners who’ve been milking casinos for millions since the early 1990s.
“Casinos suck people in, they give them the hope of winning. They’ll ply you with drinks, they’ll give you these comps, free rooms, free concert tickets, they’ll try and make it seem like they’re doing special favors for you because you’re their buddy,” he says. “They give you all this stuff and the next minute they’re snickering behind a corner waiting for you to lose all your money.”
The rise and fall of the first MIT blackjack club is profiled Sunday at 9 p.m. on Atlas Media’s two-hour documentary, Breaking Vegas, which will air on The History Channel. The show is inspired by the best-selling book “Bringing Down The House” which documented how six MIT students — a third generation of players at MIT — recently raked in millions legally cheating at blackjack.
Their exploits began in the early 1990s, when teams of highly trained MIT grad students first traded their pocket-protectors in for silk shirts on the weekends and jetted away to some of the most popular casinos in the world. They would return to school each week with enough cash duct-taped to their bodies to buy a house.
Dukach and scores of other players from MIT use a method of mathemtatical wizardry called card counting to figure out when and what kind of bets to make during a game of blackjack so that the odds swing away from the casino and are instead stacked in favor of the player.
Card counting is not illegal in the U.S., but if a casino suspects a player of using the method, the house will ban the player for life.
After getting caught many times, Dukach, who posed as a Russian arms dealer at the casinos, is barred from playing cards at every casino on earth.
That first group of MIT players were recruited and worked for a corporation formed by an eccentric 1979 MIT graduate who still goes by the name Mr. M in the documentary. His face is not seen in the film. M devised new methods for increasing a player’s chance to win money at blackjack and formed a company which taught recruits card counting, raised money for betting from investors and then unleashed the students on casino in small teams.
One or two of the players would pose as regular gamblers and when the cards were just right, they’d signal their teammate to join the game and he’d bet at least $10,000 a hand. Even though the players would return home with a CEO’s salary in cash, they’d have to fork it over to management, which kept the bulk of it and paid the players an hourly rate. Many of the students dropped out of school to concentrate on playing cards, but afterwards went on to start their own companies.
Dukach even started his own MIT blackjack team/company after Mr. M’s company collapsed following a string of bad luck, some good-will issues with gypped players and trouble with casino security. Since then, several generations of MIT players have continued to study Mr. M’s tactics and withdraw millions from casinos as if they were a giant cash machine.
“We showed the casinos a little of their own medicine,” Dukach says. “We took their comps and their rooms and we knew how they were all snickering about how they thought we were going to lose like $200,000 to pay for a ridiculous $500 room, the overpriced fight tickets or a bottle of Dom Perignon that they’d given us. We snickered back at them; there’s some satisfaction in that.”
