Contest: Blackjack tip cards from “21”
Posted on March 24, 2008 at 8:00 am
Think you can beat the house in Blackjack? That’s what a group of MIT students did. By counting cards, which is perfectly legal, they won very big in Las Vegas. Their story was told in a book called Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, now retitled “21” to tie in with this week’s release of the movie it inspired.
For those of us who are not MIT math geniuses, there is a playing card-size cheat sheet to guide your betting. Want one? I’ll send one to the first three people to send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com. Stay tuned — later this week I will post my interviews with star Jim Sturgess and the MIT math whiz who inspired both the book and the movie, Jeff Ma.
There was also an episode of this story on the show “Numbers!” It was
based very loosely on the true story. Thanks,Cindi
Thanks, Cindi! As you will see when I posted my review, they made a lot of changes to the story to “Hollywood-ize” it, so people should read the book if they want to know what really happened.
My brother-in-law read the book this movie is based on. I saw “21” recently and we compared notes … turns out precious little in the book occurs in the movie. Ah, Hollywood!