Casinos deserve whatever anyone can get from them. Card-counting is using your noodle, it is by no means a criminal activity, yet the casinos which say that gambling is a good sport we should all enjoy, don't act like good sports when others are enjoying winning (regularly). Nope, they then act like very bad sports indeed by getting these winners banned from each and every casino in the world.

Gambling in general and casinos in particular were very much in the grip of the Mafia until times not so long gone by. They might as well still be with their ways of ensuring that only they can win the big pot. They employ teams of people to spot the winners. No matter how many different casinos in any country in the world these winners are playing in, they will be identified, their descriptions circulated and eventually they will be stopped. Maybe they will merely be banned, first by one casino and then the next (sometimes before they can cash in their last-won chips), or maybe they will be taken into the 'back room' and various intimidating tactics used. This is legal. This is not the Mafia, this is not organised crime, it's organised gambling defending its right to make sure that only people who lose or at least don't win big bucks too often are allowed to play.

The M.I.T. students were all members of a professional gambling ring set up as a business. It was financed by investors, used computer programs to identify the most propitious card sequences and professors who coached the students who did the actually 'grunt work' (flying to exotic locations, staying in luxurious suites and gambling with the investors money) and who were paid a salary and commission. All they did was count the cards that had been dealt in Blackjack and then when it seemed the sequences were on their side, place a big bet. This is completely legal, there is not even a whiff of card-sharping or cheating, and what's more it isn't an infallible science, they might have won in the millions, but they lost more than a million too.

What the hell is wrong with that?

It seems to me that the casinos are bad sports. They only want losers and people who come on the occasional big weekend to see a Star Performer and win big so they can tell all their friends that they must come to Vegas and have a Good Time and Win Big. If you are a real winner, they will hunt you down and ban you. It's only for fun you see, you must only play for fun, just the luck of the draw and not win too much too often, it can't be a business, nor a career, nor a way to make money, nope, only the casinos are allowed to take gambling that seriously.

What is the difference between this slick and sleazy modus operandi and the Mafia? No concrete overcoats (I hope) is one? I can't really think of another.

Recommended for those who think that playing fair ought to be multi-lateral, not enforced uni-laterally by those who think it is only a slogan.

When he saw that I'd earmarked this book as one I'd like to read, my friend John offered to lend me his copy. It turned out, however, that he only owns a different book by the same author. That book, Busting Vegas, is the inside story of five MIT students who took Vegas for millions (although the long-winded official subtitle for that one bills it as "A True Story of Monumental Excess, Sex, Love, Violence, and Beating the Odds.").

My interest in the subject (blackjack) and author was initially piqued by viewing the movie 21 a couple weeks ago. 21 is a supposedly true story based on Bringing Down the House, and I enjoyed the film. It had its weaknesses, such as Jill's underdeveloped character (who for unexplained reasons seemed motivated to join the blackjack team in pursuit of something other than wealth and looked down on those who claimed they planned to stick around just long enough to reach a specific financial goal), but was vicariously thrilling and entertaining overall.

I will stick with Busting Vegas to the end, because I am a stubborn reader who can appreciate a good story even when it's rendered poorly, but I've lost interest in reading anything else by Ben Mezrich. I'm unimpressed by his style, which relies on short, blunt sentences and fragments, overblown generalizations, and too much time spent inside the main character's head for me to believe this is a true story rather than a fictional account loosely based on actual events. I consider Mezrich an arrogant, lucky, semi-literate hack who likes rubbing shoulders with brilliant (i.e., bright enough to bolster his own self-labeled "geek chic" image by association) societal misfits and has stretched one book's worth of research into two forgettable, indistinguishable books.

A team of MIT students become successful blackjack players utilizing card counting techniques. Their system was efficient and profitable although not without risk.

Almost made me wish I had attended MIT rather than Berkeley. :-)

I learned a lot about not only card counting but gambling generally and Vegas in particular. A good summer book.