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College Blackjack

Nothing fires up a gambler's imagination like the possibility of beating the house at its own game. Eating the house at its own game, of course, is just what a team of students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology did in the 1990s, counting cards at blackjack and earning millions along the way. The story has been well-chronicled in Ben Mezrich's 2002 best seller, Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions and two television documentaries. The book has been adapted into a screenplay for a movie to be called "21," expected to be released in 2007. In the January issue of the monthly Midwest Gaming and Travel magazine ($24 a year, (507) 835-1662; www.midwestgamingandtravel.com), team member Mike Aponte steps forward to give an insider's account in "The MIT Team's $500,000 Weekend." I spent some time with Aponte and team member David Irvine on the phone to talk about the article, the MIT team's notoriety and the home training course they've developed, available through www.blackjackinstitute.com.

Successful blackjack players know that no matter how good you are and how sound your strategy, there will be losing sessions. That's just what happened at the start of the trip chronicled in Aponte's article, when the team found itself down $53,000 before turning it around. And turn it around they did, walking away with so much cash that the only place Aponte had to put the last $30,000 was under his baseball cap as he flew back to Boston. "Money management is one of the most misunderstood concepts in blackjack," said Aponte, noting that the team knew losing sessions had to come, and were sufficiently bankrolled to withstand large losses. "That wasn't even that big a swing, down $50,000. One bank was down $300,000. Over the next two months, we won half a million." An ordinary player with a too-small bankroll could never withstand such swings. Even a player with a bankroll sufficient for his bet size, regardless of whether his big bet is $50 or $5,000, might even start doubting the math when things started to go sour. That didn't happen with the MIT team. They knew the system would make money in the long run.