The MIT Blackjack Team

The MIT Blackjack Team was a series of card counting teams drawn from students and graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and nearby universities, active from 1979 into the late 1990s. It was run as a business, with outside investors, a training programme and formal roles, and it is the most famous application of team play to blackjack. Its story is widely known through a book and a film that its own members describe as mostly fiction; this page sticks to what the documented record supports.

1979 to 1980: the start

Wikipedia’s account dates the origin to 1979, when friends of J.P. Massar, an MIT student, took a short course called “How to Gamble If You Must” during MIT’s Independent Activities Period and concluded that blackjack could be beaten. Massar tested the idea using a mainframe at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. Early trips to Atlantic City, where the casinos had just opened, were run informally.

In May 1980 Massar met Bill Kaplan, a Harvard graduate who had already run a successful counting team in Las Vegas, and Kaplan agreed to help on condition that the operation was run as a business: players would be trained, tested and checked, and investors would hold a stake. The first capitalised bank began on 1 August 1980 with $89,000. John Chang, who would later become one of the team’s longest-serving managers, joined late in 1980.

Kaplan’s approach set the pattern for everything that followed. Players had to pass “check-outs” in which they counted and played perfectly under observation before being allowed to bet the bank’s money, and their results were tracked against expectation to detect both error and dishonesty.

How team play worked

Team play predates MIT. Wikipedia’s article on Ken Uston credits him with popularising it after playing on Al Francesco’s team in the 1970s, in which members counted at different tables and a “big player” joined whichever table had a strongly positive count to place large bets. The MIT team adopted and systematised that structure.

The counting signature casinos look for is a bet spread that moves with the count at one table, as described in casino countermeasures and legality. Team play removes it: the spotter never spreads, and the big player’s bets are always large. Wikipedia describes Strategic Investments using the three-role structure of big player, controller and spotter. The “gorilla” big player of popular accounts, a non-counting player who simply bets what they are told, is not a term the Wikipedia article uses.

The economics are those of any bet spread with the losing minimum bets stripped out, at the cost of paying a spotter to produce the signal. Signals were coded words and gestures agreed in advance.

Strategic Investments, 1992 to 1993

The best-documented phase is the limited partnership. In June 1992 Kaplan, Massar and Chang formed Strategic Investments as a Massachusetts limited partnership and raised one million dollars from investors. It recruited and trained a larger roster, including Semyon Dukach, who Wikipedia describes as joining in 1992 and becoming a major player, and Jeff Ma, who joined in the mid-1990s and graduated from MIT in 1994.

Strategic Investments dissolved on 31 December 1993. Wikipedia attributes the end to a combination of casino detection and the partners moving on, rather than to a single dramatic event.

Detection

The team’s exposure came through ordinary investigative work. Wikipedia records that casino investigators noticed that a large number of barred players had addresses in or near Cambridge, Massachusetts, linked them to MIT, and added university yearbook photographs to their image databases. Once a player’s face was on file, a visit to any casino sharing the database ended quickly. The investigative firm Griffin Investigations, which operated the best-known shared database of the period, is identified in Wikipedia as the real firm behind the “Plymouth” investigators of the book.

That is also why the team’s later history is a story of smaller, more discreet groups. After Strategic Investments closed, members formed two successor teams around 1995: the Amphibians, led by Dukach with Katie Lilienkamp as controller and Andy Bloch as a spotter, and the Reptiles, led by Mike Aponte, Manlio Lopez and Wes Atamian. Wikipedia puts the end of the MIT teams’ run at around 2000, as players drifted into other careers; Dukach, Bloch and Aponte are among the former members who later became public figures in poker, business or blackjack instruction.

How much did they win?

No audited figure exists. The verifiable numbers are the $89,000 first bank in 1980 and the $1 million raised by Strategic Investments in 1992. Press and promotional accounts quote lifetime winnings in the millions, and individual players have described profitable years, but none of those claims is independently documented. A reasonable reader should treat the team as a demonstrably successful business over two decades and treat specific totals as unverified.

It is worth putting even a successful team in perspective. A counter’s edge in a shoe game is of the order of 1% of money wagered, as explained in card counting. Large profits require large bankrolls, high table limits, many player-hours and tolerance for long losing stretches, which is exactly why MIT’s operation needed investors and a management structure rather than a few clever students.

Bringing Down the House and 21

Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House (Free Press, 2003) made the team famous. Its central character, Kevin Lewis, is based on Jeff Ma. The Wikipedia article on the book records that Mezrich has acknowledged that most of its characters and incidents are composites and inventions, that Ma has said Lewis does things in the book that never happened, and that the Boston Globe concluded the book “is not a work of ‘nonfiction’ in any meaningful sense of the word”. Disputed inventions include an underground casino, strippers cashing out chips, shadowy investors and a physical assault; a theft recorded in the book as $75,000 was reported to have been closer to $20,000.

The film 21, directed by Robert Luketic and released on 28 March 2008 by Columbia Pictures, starred Jim Sturgess as Ben Campbell (the Ma-based character), Kevin Spacey as the team-running professor Micky Rosa, with Kate Bosworth and Laurence Fishburne. Wikipedia records a budget of $35 million and worldwide gross of about $158 million. It was released as “inspired by” rather than based on true events. Two departures are specifically noted: the team was always run by students and alumni, never by a professor; and the film cast mostly white actors in roles drawn from a team whose main players were largely Asian American, which drew public criticism. Ma, who appears in a cameo as a dealer, said of the casting, “I didn’t get to cast it.”

Mezrich’s follow-up Busting Vegas (2005) covers Dukach’s Amphibians, and Wikipedia notes that Dukach is the only team member referred to by his real name in either book.

What the MIT story shows

Stripped of the fiction, the MIT team demonstrates three things about counting. First, the edge is real but small, and scaling it requires capital, organisation and discipline rather than genius. Second, team play defeats the bet-spread signature only until a shared database links the players by other means. Third, the techniques themselves were nothing exotic: Hi-Lo, true counts, index plays and a betting ramp, applied without error for a very long time. The pages on bet spreads and the Illustrious 18 describe the same tools.

Everything above concerns real-money casino play. Blackjack World Tour is a free iOS blackjack game played with virtual chips; it is a social casino with in-app purchases and no real-money gambling.

Related reading

• Casino countermeasures and legality
• Famous blackjack players
• Blackjack in film and books
• Card counting overview