Famous Gamblers - the MIT Blackjack Team
Humans are lovers of forbidden fruit. If there is something out there to be had that's out of reach for most people, there will always be those exceptional few who find ways and means to get to them. Successful and famous gamblers are like that. Bob Dancer and his wife Shirley have made over a million dollars playing video poker, a game that most people don't play well enough to make even small money in.
Among the famous gamblers in modern times is the MIT Blackjack Team. No one knows for sure how much money they made in the few years when they were in operation, but estimates within the casino circles themselves go up to some US$4,000,000.
The MIT Blackjack Team sprang up in the 1990s. It was made up of a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. At first, they were into blackjack only to study its mathematical aspects. These students would play the game after school and observe the probabilities at work.
But it did not take long for this brilliant team to discover that there was money to be made in blackjack when card counting and strategy were used. The MIT Blackjack Team then started training in earnest in classrooms, apartments and warehouses. Their goal was to perfect their card counting methods in a simulated a casino environment. These simulations helped the students to practice card counting under difficult conditions. They learned to deal with pit bosses that would watch and harass them, as well as cope with the distractions and noises in casinos.
When their blackjack playing skills were perfected, the MIT Blackjack Team set out to invade the houses in Las Vegas, Nevada.
What made these famous gamblers so successful was the way the team was set up. The MIT Blackjack Team was not comprised of smart-looking white men as one might have expected. They were largely Asian, Mediterranean and even had women players. Frequently they disguised as carefree high rollers that no casino would suspect of card counting. This made them very hard to detect.
The MIT Blackjack Team was divided into three categories: Spotter, Gorilla and Big Player.
Spotters only wagered minimum bets. These were the least experienced members of the MIT Blackjack Team and their task was to count cards while passing off as low rollers.
When the count was favorable, the Spotters would signal to the Gorillas and the latter would join in to play. The Gorillas pretended to be wealthy foreigners who were there just to burn money. When the count was again unfavorable, the Spotters would signal to them again and the Gorillas would leave.
Big Players were the elite members of the MIT Blackjack Team. They could count cards while also playing. They were also versed in advanced hand decisions that made their profits even bigger.
The casinos lost a lot of money for years, and soon they realized that something was fishy was going on. They hired the Griffin Investigation Company to identify these card counters. Not for long, they had identified every MIT Blackjack Team member, and the casinos banned them for life.
The MIT Blackjack Team was not only very successful, it was also the first to make use of shuffle tracking and ace card tracking. Though their success was short-lived, these famous gamblers proved that the house could indeed be brought down.