MIT and Blackjack

Whether you’ve read, “Bringing Down the House” by Ben Mzrich, or have seen the movie “21″ acted in and produced by Jim Sturgess and Kevin Spacey more likely than not you have heard of the infamous MIT Team. During the middle to late 1970's a select group of mathematicians and Harvard business school students and professors decided to see if the could beat the casino odds and win large amounts of money in the process. In the early years they had varying degrees of success, but it wasn't until J. P. Massar overheard Bill Kaplan, a Harvard MBA graduate, in conversation at a restaurant that things changed dramatically for the better.

Bill Kaplan had been having various degrees of success with a team that he was managing in Las Vegas. Massar had a team working in Atlantic City and asked Bill if he would come along to observe what his team were doing wrong. With Kaplan's help they formed a new team that had to follow his strict guidelines and behaviour patterns. The group was soon earning between $150 to $170 per hour. Eventually they had several teams working successfully in different casinos all over the world. By the mid 1990's the various teams were bringing in anywhere between $100 000 and $500 000 per visit.

The main members of the team were Jeff Ma, John Chang, Mike Aponte, James Willis and Laurie Tsao. They all had impressive mathematical skills that helped turn the group into an impressive money-making machine. Each team member was assigned a specific responsibility in the group, as either a bettor, signaller or monitor. Training was conducted in mock casinos, various apartments and warehouses scattered around Boston. Innumerable hours were spent practicing their system.

Various signals and codewords were used for communicating with other team members. Some signals included brushing their hair to signify that a shoe was hot, going to the restroom if the shoe went cold. A hand in a pocket implied that the deck was really hot, touching an earlobe meant asking another team member what the card count was and folded arms meant that the deck was hotting up. Most importantly, holding the hair meant collect your chips and get out of here – fast! Code words were used like “pool” meaning the count was at +8 (from the term 8-ball in pool), “cats” was +9 because cats have nine lives etc.

After two years the casino caught up with the team and began changing the rules by adding more card decks to the game and by using cut offs in the card shoes. Casinos could also reserve the right to bar entry to certain players. Any number of interference techniques were used to distract the card counters like changing dealers frequently and reshuffling the cards more often. By this time the group had earned millions of dollars and the rest of the story made its way into history by the filming of the movie “21″ starring Kevin Spacey. The group certainly made their millions, and today each has their own story to tell.