Vegas, baby, Vegas!

I don't gamble much. The odds are stacked so strongly against me in nearly every game out there - from the lottery to poker, slots to tear-offs - but it's clear that not everybody looks at the long odds and turns away.

This is a History Channel ninety-minute documentary (with historically accurate recreations, woo hoo!> that tells the tale of a group of MIT students who have taken the Vegas (and Atlantic City, Monacco, Paris, etc) casinos for millions of dollars.

It isn't a how-to menual of how you might head to Vegas and rob the place blind, but it does do a nie job explaining the strategies that the college students used - card counting, team play, and hi-lo betting. The show is pretty well done - though it does suffer from some made-for-television quirks (recap of the premise every 30 minutes, bad acting in some parts, not quite movie quality film). The tale begins in 1992 when the team was first being formed and ends in late 1993 when the team that is the focus of the documentary (though other teams were built from the ashes of the main team. At one point, the team was up $888K and was being comped left and right at the casinos because they were providing so much money to the casinos.

The main stories are "why this team worked for a year and a half" and "what went wrong in the team dynamic that eventually killed the success?". We get interviews with the real team members and bunches of recreations with slightly more attractive people (a source of comedy to me). Through the intercutting of the two, the story is quite well told, and the destruction is well told.

I'd initially grabbed this from PLCH because a friend of mine was at MIT at this time and knew a number of people who had been a part of the MIT blackjack club. Interesting to me...might be to you as well, even without the personal connection.