Bringing Down the House
The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
by Ben Mezrich · first published 2002
19mentions
5recommended by
19HN commenters
2008–2024first – last mentioned
26% recommend68% neutral5% critical
Why HN recommends it
Narrative account of a card-counting team's blackjack winnings. Fascinating and easy to read, it follows the high-stakes casino story and the people behind it. Suits anyone curious about gambling strategy.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Great from start to finish,unreal to know it's true and so loved it because I'm from Boston.
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Ever since I read 'Bringing down the house' by Ben Mezrich, i've been curious and amazed by guys who game gambling. This forum is populated by people who fit the intellectual profile. Has anyone here ever done anything like that? Just curious.
on “Gambling geniuses.” ↗Was The Ugly Americans good? I really enjoyed Bringing Down the House.
on “A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market” ↗I've read the book "Bringing down the house", really fascinating read. Definitely going to go to this movie!
on “"21", Movie about MIT Las Vegas Card Counters Opens Tomorrow” ↗…deck. Then when the cards ran out and were reshuffled, the Big Player would split and look for another hot deck at another table. This way they could multiply the gain when they found a hot deck. "Bringing Down the House" (the book the movie was based on) was one of the best of the 100 or so books I've read in the last year. PS How cool is it that Kevin Spacey reads Wired?
on “"21", Movie about MIT Las Vegas Card Counters Opens Tomorrow” ↗If you enjoyed Bringing Down the House, I'd say you'd pretty close to equally enjoy The Ugly Americans.
on “A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market” ↗The other day I met a guy who belonged to the MIT card-counting team portrayed in the book Bringing Down the House. He mentioned that casino security departments are now looking up their patrons on Facebook: if five people show up at the blackjack tables at the same time and act like they don’t know each other, but…
on “Wikileaks Founder: Facebook is the most appalling spy machine ever invented” ↗See also http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N12/blackjack.html for an interview with Ben Mezrich, author of "Bringing Down the House" and Jeffrey Ma, the person that Jim Sturgess' character is based on.
on “"21", Movie about MIT Las Vegas Card Counters Opens Tomorrow” ↗Your middle paragraph was true, but is now outdated as of the last 15 years or so. This is indeed how the MIT Blackjack Team worked, as documented in books like Bringing Down The House. However, casinos now know of and how to foil this strategy. The countermove is to prohibit entering a table while a shoe is in progress. Either the new player must wait until the deck reaches its…
on “A Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code (2018)” ↗Anybody ever read "Ugly Americans" by Ben Mezrich? This reminds me of that. (BTW - he was the guy that wrote "Bringing Down the House")
on “$7.1 Billion Fraud - Could Be The Largest Trading Fraud Ever” ↗…more important than being able to prove that it’s true." Minispeak, if I've ever heard it. Ick. This book will be sensationalist entertainment posing as non-fiction. It will probably be a good read, as Bringing Down The House was, but it had nothing to do with the reality of the situation, and it will serve to further distance the current image of the web entrepreneur from reality.
…try to make Eduardo out to be the good guy, I'm probably going to walk out of it. In every report I've read about the early stages of that company, that guy sounds like a real douche-bag. Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House was a good read, but it sounded very embellished / made up. I didn't trust it as a read of non-fiction. And the movie 21 was just a complete piece of crap. However this movie is directed by the guy who…
on “The Social Network (2010)” ↗For me this was one case where the movie was far better than the book. The movie was very good, and the book, was, like, written, really badly. (and I was a fan of Mezrich's Bringing Down the House)
on “Ask HN: Inspirational movies” ↗The book "Bringing Down the House" by Ben Mezrich explains in layman's terms how card counting works for blackjack.
on “DEF CON 32 Was Canceled. We Un-Canceled it” ↗…hackers", e.g. - Edward O. Thorp ("Beat the Dealer" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_O._Thorp ) - Keith Taft (http://www.blackjackforumonline.com/content/taftint.html) - the MIT Blackjack Team ( "Bringing down the house" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bringing_Down_the_House_(book) )
on “Hacking Real World Systems” ↗…inside job, but I can see how Ivey could gain a significant advantage without even needing any "social engineering." "it just sounds like a lot of work, and a way smaller edge." If you read Ben Meizrich's Bringing Down the House, you wouldn't believe the degree to which these guys work to get an advantage over the house. There's a part in the book where he talks about how members of the MIT Black Jack Team so thoroughly practiced…
on “Sorting Out the Law Behind Phil Ivey's Edge Sorting Debacle at Borgata” ↗