I found Bringing Down the House at a used bookstore weeks ahead of my very first trip to Las Vegas and I took it as kismet. I brought it along for the flight and for any pool time we could muster in the 110+ degree heat.

This was Mezrich's first nonfiction book and in it he tells the story of a MIT graduate who, along with a team of others, learned how to game casinos and win big at blackjack. Their system was fascinating and it worked for a long time...until it didn't.

Mezrich writes really exciting nonfiction and this was the perfect companion to bring to Sin City!

Click here to hear more of my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive!

Ben Mezrich has done it again. He's one of the premier non-fiction storytellers in the world today and this is just another shining example of his talent.

I loved watching the movie 21 when it was released a number of years ago now, and am shocked by how different the movie is to the book. Often there are differences, but this is almost like two separate stories. Between the two, I'd say read the book.

A very entertaining read about the escapades of a group of MIT students using their God-given gifts to take down the casino's in Vegas, and eventually elsewhere.

Ben Mezrich's writing is fast paced and puts you in the moment of the excitement of Vegas. Some GR's reviewers have indicated that pieces of the story are fabricated. I have no idea if that is fact, or just someone who has a grudge against the author, or key players in the book. It is apparent there are people out there who would have liked to seen these kids prosecuted. Too bad, for the casino's, card counting is not illegal. The only option open to casino's is to ban the player.

Fast paced, quick read-I liked it

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.

This book has reaffirmed how not into gambling I am. I've never been to Vegas, but I get nervous playing penny slots in Atlantic City so the whole world just freaks me out. But this story is so incredible. So seemingly impossible. And yet believable. These kids are smarter than me, and they're bolder than me. This book is worth reading, and it will make you see the world of Vegas in a whole new way.

1. Plot Overview (Don’t give the ending away!) What did you like about the plot? Did it move quickly or slowly? What didn’t you like? Was it interesting or not? Why? Give details!

The plot was pretty good. The story was about students at MIT college who count cards in blackjack and convince an extremely smart student to join their group. They go to Las Vegas every weekend to count cards and come back to attend school durring the week days.




2. Character Overview: Who were you favorite characters? Describe them—what were they like? Did they remind you of someone? Who/how? How are you like them, even in small ways?

I had no favorites but they all had different personalitys by far and they were all unique in different ways.





3. Theme Overview: Choose a theme starter word (love, hate, revenge, friendship, anger, etc.) and tell us what the author is saying about it.
Example: Forgiveness = The author teaches us that sometimes you have to forgive yourself before you can forgive someone else. She shows this through the characters of Danny and Sandy when…

There are many themes in this book but the most relevant is love, friendship and revenge because of the girl he has a crush on is with him through it all and he wants to be with her. Friendship is because of his two friends who are working with him on a huge project that he just laid off and at the end try to reunite. and revenge because his leader betrays him and he takes action on that.

I read this book first in my college days - when we were frequent gamblers and it was so intriguing and I thought just maybe we too could be professional gamblers - why not, right! Today, it was a great re-read with a new perspective as a career woman for over 15 years and one that takes much less risk when hitting any casinos and I wonder about things so differently now!

Nicely and fast paced written as this book may be it often feels like the story is far stretched from reality to add drama and make it more interesting.
Still it has a great balance of educating the reader, keeping him interested and making it a hard to put down book.

3.25* - inspired by my previous read which had a kind of Robin Hood theme i chose this as my next book - another "free little library" find. It's more David and Goliath than Robin Hood, and even then, we're talking about young people who had the financial and/or intellectual capital to attend MIT, so they weren't necessarily the little guy either.

Why read this? If you want to...
- Get a taste for what life was like in the 90s before the internet blew up (before the dot com bust),
- See what airplane travel was like just a few years before September 11th (the team members carried cash strapped to their bodies

“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.

This book focuses on Kevin Lewis, one of six students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who form a team to count cards in casinos, playing the mathematical odds to win at blackjack. Though it is not illegal, the casinos are not keen on any activity that gives an advantage to the player, and they can ban them from their establishments.

I live in Nevada and have been to Las Vegas many times, so I was easily able to picture the scenes. As with many people who live here, I am not a gambler. But this book is more about calculating occasions when the odds will favor the player, so it is not exactly the same as true gambling, which always favors the house. The events of this book took place in the 1990s and many casinos have since taken measures to prevent card counting.

The story is filled with the ostentation and spectacle of the Las Vegas strip. It occasionally ventures into sexist territory, especially in descriptions of women. The writing is passable, but one does not read this type of book for its literary merit. It is marketed as non-fiction, but the copyright page states that “the names of many of the characters and locations in this book have been changed, as have certain physical characteristics and other descriptive details. Some of the events and characters are also composites of several individual events or persons.” Overall, I found it a fast-paced entertaining read.

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.