The movie 21 earned little praise from critics, and it
disappointed alumni who’d hoped for a less Hollywoodized adaptation of Bringing
Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for
Millions. But the week before the movie’s March release, MIT students crowded
into 26-100 to hear Michael Aponte ‘92 and David Irvine ‘95 talk about their
adventures on the MIT blackjack team, whose exploits Ben Mezrich retold in his
best-selling 2002 book.
The house always wins? Hah!
Jeff Ma ’94, who helped the MIT blackjack team beat Vegas at one of its signature games, appears in a cameo role as a blackjack dealer in Columbia Pictures’ 21. Other members of the team also found their way into the film.
In the 1990s, the team (which was not an official,
Institute-sanctioned organization and included members not affiliated with MIT)
applied rigorous training and teamwork to the decades-old art of counting cards
dealt in blackjack. “The only thing I knew about card counting is what I saw in
Rain Man,” said Aponte to the audience. He joined the team as a senior; after
training, he lost $10,000 in 10 minutes during his first game of blackjack at
Caesar’s Palace, but he went on to net $25,000 that weekend. Card counting is
legal, Aponte says, because everyone at the table has access to the same
information; counters are using only their intellect to gain an advantage. However,
casinos reserve the right to bar players who engage in it. Thus the drama of
the story centered on the MIT players’ attempts to avoid detection.
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“We weren’t a bunch of gamblers. First and foremost, we were
a business,” said Aponte. He explained that the team kept strict records of
gains and losses and calculated individual players’ totals depending on time
played and money made. But when Irvine’s
Italian grandmother found out about the card counting, she advised him, “Don’t
get rubbed out.”
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Aponte and Irvine
told students that they and their teammates eventually had to use pseudonyms
and disguises–wigs, mustaches, and even a fat suit–when casinos started to
track them as “undesirables.” Griffin Investigations, a detective agency
working for the casinos, didn’t catch them until they were exposed by an
anonymous tip. The tipster was probably a former team member, the two mused.
Though the characters in 21 meet with violence, Aponte said
he was never physically threatened by casino management. Usually someone would
just firmly tell him he had to leave. “Because of MIT’s reputation, the casinos
had an overblown image of our threat to them,” he said. Aponte retired from
card counting in the spring of 2000, and now he and Irvine run the Blackjack Institute, which
offers instructional DVDs and personalized training. For $7,000, one of them
will visit clients for a day to teach them the “MIT way” to count cards.
Observant viewers will spot MIT alums throughout 21: Jeff Ma
‘94, the inspiration for the main character in both the book and the movie,
appears as a Las Vegas dealer, and Henry Houh
‘89 (who has five MIT degrees, including a PhD) plays a dealer in a card house
in Boston’s Chinatown.
Albert M. Chan, SM ‘99, PhD ‘04, also makes a cameo appearance as a card dealer,
and iRobot cofounder Colin Angle ‘89, SM ‘91, plays Professor Hanes, who calls
out the winner of a robot competition.
