How MIT Students Broke the Bank in Vegas

Sept. 15 -- In Las Vegas, the house always wins — unless you're a math whiz from MIT.

Through the years, a group of math students at the world-famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology has focused their considerable brain power on a very extracurricular activity: gambling — specifically blackjack.

The students realized that blackjack was the only beatable game in casino gambling — and beat it they did. By the 1990s, the team — whose membership rotated over the years — was making regular trips to Las Vegas and winning big.

"They took over $400,000 in one weekend out of the casinos in Las Vegas," says Gordon Adams, a casino security investigator.

The team used a method known as card-counting, which helps players predict when the cards being dealt will be favorable to them. By knowing which cards have been spent and which ones remain in the shoe, savvy players can keep a running "count" which works as a rough predictor of how many high cards are left. High cards work to a player's benefit because they boost the odds that they will beat the dealer.

The MIT players were not the first to count cards. But they used their math expertise — and advanced computer models — to hone their skills to a devastatingly effective science. They wrote computer programs to devise the best strategy for specific situations, then updated their data with real-life experience.

"After a trip to Vegas, we would enter all the information about what happened into the computers," remembers Semyon Dukach, a student who was a member of the team in the early 1990s.

New members of the team were "trained" for weeks or months, starting on MIT's Cambridge, Mass., campus, then getting experience in backroom card games in Boston's Chinatown. Then they would be sent to Vegas, where they would start out as a "mule" carrying cash, then work their way up in the team's hierarchy.

The team visited Las Vegas regularly, peaking in the 1990s with trips nearly every weekend.