The Real Card Counters

While sitting down to a game of “Whisk” as a child, I was always amazed at how ardently Grandma would count the cards, at what is ultimately a game of chance, and by contrast, how my Grandfather, who didn’t even pay attention, always managed to win!

Blackjack, however, is a whole different story. “21” a movie starring Kevin Spacey and Jim Sturgess, is about a group of young card counters who take casinos by storm, has its basis in a real life story of MIT and Harvard profs, students and ex-students who, with varying degrees of success, managed to form teams of blackjack players and attempt to improve the odds through innovative techniques shuffle tracking, ace tracking, and card counting.

The movie is based in large part, on the book Bringing Down The House by Ben Mezrich. Both the book and the film have significant portions of true fact, and dramatized fiction. The first blackjack teams were started at MIT, by Harvard Business School and MIT students and ex-students in 1979. What started as a club activity playing for spare change was morphed into a real life trip to Atlantic City to test out a few extremely complicated mathematical formulas which….quite simply, didn’t work.

Once J.P Massar and Bill Kaplan joined forces, and started a club that utilized a uniform technique, strict statistical analysis of performance and rigorous training and recruitment techniques, some progress was made. So much progress, in fact, that the overall odds of winning increased from 2-4% per game, which over time, led to annual profits of up to 250% by investors in the club.

While the romance element and casino boss intimidation factors of the movie are no doubt played up tremendously, it is indeed true that at one time, the club had over 80 members! The whole idea was that at any one time, at the very least, a significant number of them would be playing. In order for the strategy to work, it takes a lot of play, over a long period of time, in order to turn a profit.

Obviously, you can only outsmart the house so much, until the house brings down the heat! No casino likes cheaters, and while not technically cheating, there could be no doubt that the system was being worked, and that changes had to be made. As a result, casinos changed various rules of the game, and barred certain recurring card counters from frequenting their casinos. Card counters got more and more creative, so much so that teams of card counters still occasionally manage to disguise their techniques to a point where they walk out of casinos with significant winnings, but most of the time, these types of team style tactics are noticed and stopped before they ruin the fun not only for the casino, but for the other players at the table, for whom the joy of the game is diminished greatly.

There is little doubt that card counting works, but whether or not its worth the effort, or eventual barring from the casino still stands up to much argument and from practitioners and critics alike.