“Busting Vegas” is another true story by Ben Mezrich about some MIT students and how they managed to win millions of dollars at the Casinos playing Black Jack. If you don’t know Vegas odds, Craps has the best odds for the player, i.e. you, unless you know how to count cards or do some other tricks in Blackjack, at which point BlackJack is the best game for you. At first I thought this was going to be another card counting game like his last book, “Bringing Down the House,” but the MIT students don’t count cards at all, unless you consider being able to cut a 6 shoe deck exactly 52 cards in. If you didn’t understand that last sentence, you probably won’t like the book. Anyways, if you plan on reading the book, stop here, as I am about to tell you there tricks, which may or may not ruin the book for you.

So, there are three ways in which these guys are able to tip the odds into their favor, all of which are technically legal. The main thing about all of these is you need to have the table to yourself, which is usually available to high enough rollers, which these MIT students were able to do.

1. The first method used is to somehow find a dealer with small hands. This way, when they are re-shuffling the decks, you are able to see what the bottom card is. What you are looking for is an ace. When the ace is seen and when the dealer asks you to cut the deck, you cut it exactly 52 cards in, and then wait for that card to show up. You then increase your bets substantially when that 52nd card is about to come up, and assuming you are the only person at the table, you can give yourself a tremendous advantage over the house.
2. The second method is to find an old trusty dealer who always shuffles the deck perfectly. Assuming the dealer will always shuffle correctly, you can watch a hand play out and memorize the sequence of cards that were played and put back in the shuffle deck. Then, depending on the number of shuffles, you can assume the dealer added one card in b/t each card in your sequence. Then all you do is wait for that sequence to appear, and make your bets accordingly. I could be off on the exactness of this method as I read the book a few weeks ago, but I am pretty sure this is how it went.
3. The final method is almost a complete replica of the first method, but you are looking for a face card. You then cut to the 52nd card, but instead of trying to get the 10 or face card on one of your hands, you try and have it hit the dealer as a bust card. Since you won’t bust yourself on your 6 hands (maximum allowed), and you assume the dealer won’t deal himself a 17 or higher, you can force the dealer the bust himself, thus allowing all your hands to win, instead of just the one hand like in the first method.

All these methods are based on mathematical calculations. I believe the house has about a 2% advantage on a normal blackjack hand, but with the 3rd method listed here, you can have a 50% advantage, which completely negates the small house advantage. Assume you are betting hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you can see why they became rich rather quickly.

Of course, as with the first MIT kids in “Bringing down the house,” this group of kids eventually became banned from all casinos around the world, including the famous casino Monte Carlo that Barbie and I once gambled at. An overall fun read if you are into gambling.