Blackjack is a casino banking game. It is the most widely played casino banking game in the world. It uses decks of 52 cards and descends from a global family of casino banking games known as "twenty-one". This family of card games also includes the European games vingt-et-un and pontoon, and the Russian game Ochko. The game is a comparing card game where players compete against the dealer, rather than each other.
Card counting is a blackjack strategy used to determine whether the player or the dealer has an advantage on the next hand.
The MIT Blackjack Team was a group of students and ex-students. The students were from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and other leading colleges; they used card counting techniques and more sophisticated strategies to beat casinos at blackjack worldwide. The team and its successors operated successfully from 1979 through the beginning of the 21st century. Many other blackjack teams around the world have been formed with the goal of beating the casinos.
Ben Mezrich is an American author.
Edward Oakley Thorp is an American mathematics professor, author, hedge fund manager, and blackjack researcher. He pioneered the modern applications of probability theory, including the harnessing of very small correlations for reliable financial gain.
Breaking Vegas is an American television series that premiered on the History Channel in 2004. The series covers the great lengths people have gone to make money, sometimes illegally, from casinos.
Ken Uston was an American blackjack player, strategist and author, credited with popularizing the concept of team play at blackjack. During the early to mid-1970s he gained widespread notoriety for perfecting techniques to do team card counting in numerous casinos worldwide, earning millions of dollars from the casinos, with some bets as high as $12,000 on a single hand.
International Game Technology (IGT) was an American gaming company based in Las Vegas which manufactured and distributed slot machines and other gambling technology. It was acquired in 2015 by GTECH, for $6.4 billion which then adopted the IGT name.
Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions is a 2003 book by Ben Mezrich about a group of MIT card counters commonly known as the MIT Blackjack Team. Though the book is classified as non-fiction, The Boston Globe alleges that the book contains significant fictional elements, that many of the key events propelling the drama did not occur in real life, and that others were exaggerated greatly. The book was adapted into the movies 21 and The Last Casino.
John Ferguson, known by his pen name, Stanford Wong, is a gambling author best known for his book Professional Blackjack, first published in 1975. Wong's computer program "Blackjack Analyzer", initially created for personal use, was one of the first pieces of commercially available blackjack odds analyzing software. Wong has appeared on TV multiple times as a blackjack tournament contestant or as a gambling expert. He owns a publishing house, Pi Yee Press, which has published books by other gambling authors including King Yao.
The Last Casino is a 2004 English-French-Cantonese-language Canadian drama film about a card counting scheme. The film was produced by Greg Dummett, Lorraine Richard and Madeleine Henri, directed by Pierre Gill and written by Steven Westren. The Last Casino stars Charles Martin Smith as Barnes, Katharine Isabelle as Elyse, Kris Lemche as Scott, Julian Richings as Orr and Albert Chung as George.
21 is a 2008 American heist drama film directed by Robert Luketic and distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing. The film is inspired by the story of the MIT Blackjack Team as told in Bringing Down the House, the best-selling 2003 book by Ben Mezrich. IMDb offers a brief summary of the film: "21 is about six MIT students who become trained to be experts in card counting in Black Jack and subsequently took Las Vegas casinos for millions in winnings." The film stars Jim Sturgess, Kevin Spacey, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Bosworth, Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts, Aaron Yoo, and Kieu Chinh. 21 was a box office success and was the number one film in the United States and Canada during its first and second weekends of release, despite some mixed reviews.
The Blackjack Hall of Fame honors the greatest blackjack experts, authors, and professional players in history. It was launched in 2002, and its physical premises are in San Diego, California.
Mike Aponte, also known as MIT Mike, is a professional blackjack player and a former member of the MIT Blackjack Team. Aponte was part of a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students that legally won millions playing blackjack at casinos around the world by counting cards. He is the basis for one of the main characters, Jason Fisher, in the book, Bringing Down the House, by Ben Mezrich, which inspired the motion picture, 21.
Semyon Dukach is an American entrepreneur and former professional blackjack player. He is the founding partner of One Way Ventures, a venture capital fund that backs immigrant entrepreneurs.
Busting Vegas is a 2005 book by Ben Mezrich about a group of MIT card counters and blackjack players commonly known as the MIT Blackjack Team. The subtitle of the original, hardcover edition was The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees, but the subtitle of the subsequent paperback editions was A True Story of Monumental Excess, Sex, Love, Violence, and Beating the Odds.
SHFL entertainment, Inc. was a manufacturer of shuffling machines, table games, slot machines, and other casino products, based in Paradise, Nevada. Founded in 1983, it was acquired by Bally Technologies in 2013. Bally was itself acquired the following year by Scientific Games, now Light & Wonder, which continues to use the Shuffle Master name as one of its core brands.
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is the name given by gambling authors to the four U.S. Army engineers who first discovered in the 1950s the best playing strategy in the casino game of Blackjack that can be formulated on the basis of the player's and the dealer's cards. The so-called Basic Strategy, which was subsequently refined through the use of computers and combinatorial analysis, loses the least money to the casino in the long term.
Colin Jones is a Blackjack card-counting expert, teacher, and entrepreneur. He was a founder and manager of The Church Team, a successful Blackjack card-counting team based in Seattle, Washington, which won approximately 3.2 million dollars from casinos between 2006 and 2011. Jones is featured prominently in the 2011 award-winning documentary, Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians. He owns the website Blackjack Apprenticeship and holds regular Blackjack boot camps in Las Vegas.
Al Francesco is an American blackjack player and gambling strategist. Considered to be “The Godfather of Blackjack”, Francesco is recognized as the creator of the team play concept, the “big player” strategy, and the drop card method. Beginning in 1971, Francesco personally recruited and trained disciplined card counters to work together in teams to beat the casinos. Franceso's teams of blackjack players would station themselves at various blackjack tables to count the decks, and when the mathematical odds turned in their favor, the counters would signal a “Big Player” to come to the table and place large wagers until the edge was lost and once again favored the dealer. While most card counters would eventually be discovered by casinos through their betting patterns and banned from further play, Francesco's unique team concept helped his players evade detection and continue winning.
