Extremely entertaining, much better than the movie (even though the movie is a guilty pleasure), highly recommend a read

It was a page turner! I finished this one in one day. The story drew me in and I loved learning about how the MIT students were able to win big in Vegas with their mathematical skill and teamwork. Some of the characters struggle with what they are doing; those same people are often drawn back in for more, however. The Vegas lifestyle and making immense amounts of money are addictive.

Real page turner. Thought they were gonna get nailed but they beat the system although had a few dust ups. Wonderful description of Vegas and other casino sites. Worth your time.

Bringing down the house was one of my favorite books I have read. I really like how the author always keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time. First of all, I chose to read this book because I am interested in cards. I love how the author explained in detail how the students from MIT card counted. He went so in depth to telling us that if a card was under seven then, add +one to the count and so on. I didn't know much about blackjack before I read this book and now I feel like I know a lot more about the game. Also, I didn't know a lot about Vegas because I have never been there. In the book, it really expressed how much fun someone has when he or she has money. People could go to the club, spend money on drinks, and best of all gamble. According to Petra eggs, she states that card counting is using your noodle. I one hundred percent agree with her. People who are smart and gifted enough should be allowed to card count at their own will. If casinos don't want people to card count, then just have a automatic shuffler or shuffle every few hands. It seems like the casinos are salty and shouldn't be. It is completely legal for people to card count and I don't believe they should be punished for doing so. On gregs review, he says that the book was incorrect sometimes. He says that most of the details in this book were very extreme and that they could have never happened. I somewhat agree with that because the story doesn't add up. If some college students this calm casually bet thousands of dollars in casinos, the casino would have caught them much sooner than they did. Also, it is a bit extreme that Kevin’s parents never found out that he counted cards until they did. Overall, I thought that this books was very good. I am personally interested and like to play cards. This book helped expand my knowledge on blackjack and vegas in general.

blackjack and stock trading have similar principles.
Get in on a winning hand
Get out on a bad hand like consolidation or when stocks go opposite your trades.
Double down on your good hands and minimize your minimum bets on bad hands.

“Bringing Down the House” is a book filled with adventure. Join Kevin, Mickey, Fisher, and Martinez, a group of the best and brightest M.I.T. students, who take up blackjack under a complete mastermind. When just a small blackjack club turns out to be a ring of card savants with a system for playing large and winning big!


Personally, I believe that the book was very well written. One reader stated that, “the characters were not believable most of the time” but I disagree. I thought that the author portrayed each character in a believable way. I think that if I was in the shoes of one of the characters I would react in a similar way. Some readers believed that the large use of swear words in the book was a weakness, but I think the opposite. I think that the author was trying to show the different feelings of the characters by trying to help the reader connect. I think that the use of these specific words helped readers connect because everyone swears once in a while.


I think that a reader who loves thrill and is not afraid with connecting with the characters would love this book. I, myself, connected to Kevin the most and when Kevin found out the bad news about Fisher starting a team without Kevin, I personally shed a tear. If you do not like constant repetition, such as going to the casino every other chapter then I believe that this may not be the book for you.


The book has many strengths as well as a few weaknesses. I think that the constant repetition, that I stated before, maybe could be turned down a little in the sense of spacing it out. I understood the reason why it was as it was, but it made the book a little boring at times. A strength that I found in the book is the ability the author has to connect you with one of the characters. I did really get connected with Kevin throughout the whole of the book and did feel upset when something bad was happening, but on the other side I did get cheerful when something happy was taking place.


There is some vocabulary in the book that you may have to look up to understand different pages, but overall I believe that the book was well written and well thought of. The author portrayed everything well.

The story of Kevin Lewis and some other MIT kids of Asian descent, who were hand-picked by a former MIT prof to count cards in Vegas. Backed by “shady investors” that they supposedly never met, the team used a decades-old method of card counting (a modified version of “hi-lo,” based on the number of high cards left in the deck) and some interesting hand signals to collectively rake in the millions.

This is Mezrich’s first non-fiction book, and it shows; oh does it ever show. There is a small “details have been changed” notice under the copyright info, but this does not justify Mezrich’s copious use of detail and conversation that could not possibly be known to him, let alone accurately reported. It’s no great sin to use created conversation to capture the feel of a true event, but it’s disingenuous of the author not to at least acknowledge what he’s done. And while I don’t want to call him or Lewis a liar, the tacked-on drama (beatings in the bathroom of an off-shore casino; a break-in; a solitary poker chip left ominously on Lewis’ table) seem a bit too much ripped from just the style of thriller that Mezrich is apparently accustomed to writing. In sum, there might be an interesting story here, but this book, while admittedly fun to read, with its flat drama and unsympathetic characters (aw, poor Kevin, making a great living at a trading firm, trying to “get out” of the humdrum existence of the MIT grad with the house and two cars... boo hoo, guy) isn’t great.

Bringing Down The House: The Inside Story of Six Massachusetts Card Counter MIT Students That Took Las Vegas For Dollars is by Ben Mezrich about a group of students who were a part of the first-ever MIT Blackjack Team to ever win the World Championship. The title, Bringing Down The House, was chosen because they were the only team to bring down a house, which is the number of cards needed to win a game of blackjack. The story of this amazing team is fascinating as they took on the top players from the casinos in Vegas in the hopes that they could win a million bucks. Once they won the game, the only place they were able to go to celebrate was Las Vegas, and that is where they went for an all-all-expenses-paid expenses-paid trip to the Bellagio.

Bernard Langford is the leader of the team, along with his best friend Aaron Grissom. The three friends traveled around Las Vegas, winning blackjack games, however, once they got to the Bellagio they realized that this was going to be a lifetime trip for them. This is where the book takes a turn because in Bringing Down The House: The Inside Story Of Six MIT Blackjack Players, Mezrich claims that he and Grissom were the lucky ones that didn't fall victim to a robbery. The Bellagio was one of the most famous casinos in the world, and they allowed them to stay there for free with their winnings.

However, what happened after this is rather shocking. It turned out that this casino was a huge scam and they actually had fake money in their pockets and used it to pay off the people they owed money to. What brought this to light was that the players were forced to hand over their winnings to the company, the owners had run off with their money, instead of to the people they actually won from the casino. Bringing Down The House is an entertaining read, and the real story behind the team is great to learn about. If you are looking for an interesting book that will make you laugh as well as learn, then this is a great read.

Amazing! I’ve seen 21 but still couldn’t put this book down. The author is a genius and his commentary 100% added to and enhanced the story. This is the best kind of thriller because it’s a true story. The details of card counting are a lot more apparent here than in the movie.

Mezrich also expertly highlights the broader topic of the insatiable thirst for wealth and pleasure with which Vegas seems to naturally teem.
The statistics component is a math majors dream. I also loved the Boston descriptors bc it made me excited to be there

Thanks Michael Phelps for the rec

I guess the main thing I liked about this book was the Cinderella-like story of a bunch of college kids making beaucoup bucks off the casinos - more or less legally. The story doesn't really build to any kind of climatic ending, though, and the author's interludes - especially the one where he interviews a stripper while she gives him a lap dance - seem almost like "filler" material. Still, the story of how these groups organized and their tactics for winning are pretty amazing and worth the read. Expect a healthy dose of swearing whenever the college kids are directly quoted.

I love books about casinos! There really aren't enough of them. Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions follows six M.I.T. students who form a blackjack card-counting team. There were so many interesting nuggets of information throughout this gem. If I hadn't know that this was non-fiction prior to having read it, I would have thought that this was a literary thriller.

Did you know card-counting is not cheating? Apparently, it isn't. If you don't alter the outcome of the game in anyway, which you don't when counting cards, then you are not cheating. However, casinos don't look upon card-counters too kindly. Casinos have their own set of rules for handling card-counters.. involving ending up in back-rooms. It's all very mafia-like.



I read this book for my popsugar challenge, for the prompt "a book involving a heist" but I would have read this anyway. This was a page-turner of the highest-order. This was Ben Mezrich's first foray into non-fiction. He has written several other pieces of non-fiction, including Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions, Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai, and Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History. In addition, there is also a "semi-sequel" to this book, entitled Busting Vegas: A True Story of Monumental Excess, Sex, Love, Violence, and Beating the Odds.

I'd recommend this to anyone who likes the Ocean's movies and the movie that this book was based on, 21.

I like the fact that this is really happened. That the protagonist name is really Jeffrey Ma and he agreed to surface 7 years after the book was originally published. The story is astonishing: imagine an MIT grad raking millions of pesos by card counting in Las Vegas. Talking about using one's brain to circumvent the old, old game of blackjack!

I saw the movie in a cheap DVD copy from St. Francis and I liked it. The book version is tamed which is expected because it is based on actual events while the movie was exaggerated for cinematic event.

I am definitely not into gambling except when I was in high school and all of us in the family used to play dugtugan and 45 or bantukan when we were in the barrio in Lipuso and we just had nothing to do at night or when the sun was too hot to go and farm.

But this book is very informative. I don't think I will have the change to do card counting and I definitely have no patience to memorize those cards.