Customer Reviews

Breaking Vegas

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Let me be clear here. I'm a bit of a Mezrich fan. That is, I enjoy his subjects for what they are -quick, entertaining reads because of the sheer audacity exhibited by the people portrayed within his works.

Whether every aspect of his work is true or bears some embellishment hardly matters to me when buying one of his books. I'm just looking forward to reading about the type of life I'll never live but can certainly enjoy vicariously.

Busting Vegas is a good companion to his earlier work Taking Down the House. Mezrich is almost apologetic when he explains why he chose to revisit old ground. The ideal situation would have been if BOTH of these tales were under one cover.

The writing is fine. It could have been more tightly written certainly but the idea is to follow the events as well as put out a product with some length to it.

This is the kind of book you can take to the beach, or on a plane trip as one reviewer noted, and help enhance the time you while away. I deliberated over whether to star this as a 3 or a 4 (Amazon and Netflix need to allow for half a star voting soon); and finally settled on 4 stars as I have qualified this review.

I'm not sure if Mezrich patrols these reviews ever but just in case, I have a request. Could you dig a little deeper into MIT sometime soon? It seems to me this is the second book where a cabal of MIT mad scientists have come together using a cleverly hatched plan to bring ruin to the gambling underworld! Oh okay, maybe it's not as sinister as I wish it to be, but still... SOMETHING is going on at MIT.

This book claims to be a true story of Semyon Dukach, who bested the world of casino blackjack. Could be true. Maybe it isn't. Doesn't matter. It's a helluva good story about some MIT students who followed a mentor with a new and not illegal system of beating the odds at blackjack. It tracks this team from Vegas to Atlantic City and finally to Europe and Monte Carlo. The Afterword by Mr. Dukach, himself, expains the winning system, so you too can be a big winner at the casinos. Just don't get greedy like he and his partners did. This is an easy, fun, roller-coaster ride of a book.

I read the prior book to this one as well - about the card counters. This one, as with the other is not non-fiction. It is made up. I didn't even get past a page or two before I started laughing. Ben tries to make exciting plot lines but ends up with nonsense - his silliness with a ".35 automatic" is a perfect example. .35 automatic? What is that? There is no such thing. Then there is the opening of the book where a supposed plane incident occurs. His ridiculous story is so unrealistic it is really really funny. He makes up details that are comical.

Do yourself a favor and skip this book (and the author's other books as well). This guy is just a hack writer trying to ride the wave and does a horrible job with fact checking and research.

Length:: 4:22 Mins

Ben Mezrich is an excellent author and writes action packed true stories. I have always enjoyed gaming and to beat the house using brains is always a great thing. You can check out other summaries of Ben's at successprogress dot com.

Bought this to read on a flight out of Vegas. Regardless of whether the characters in it are true or not, I found the plot to be boring most of the time, predictable all of the time, and gripping none of the time. His writing style is simply awful, and detracts heavily from what little story is there.

Ben Mezrich has made a career of glamorizing geeks as they go from nerdy ivy-league academic overachievers to boyz with toyz (girls, guns, and cash). Along the way as he crafted his page-turners, folks suspect that his earlier career as a novelist is informing or overshadowing his latter career as a Tom Wolfe-journalist of hidden subcultures.

In "Breaking Vegas" (BV) he continues with his well-honed formula, but as transparent as Mezrich's style and agenda may be, he writes a great book. BV follows the arc of the career of Russian émigré and MIT student Semyon Dukach as he and his team mates deploy three probability enhancing strategies over "basic strategy" (Blackjack's -2% probability equivalent optimal strategy). Along the way they meet thugs, casino "hosts," Police, prostitutes, and druggies, making the whole thing as atmospheric as any memory of Vegas you may have.

There are many irritating elements in the work: Mezrich's breast-fetishism for one (not a single female appears in the book without her breasts being described!). But the single most irritating is how much of a "math genius" Semyon is. It is an old literary trope...keep referring to your character as a genius, even if they do ordinary things...surround the character with folks who laud his/her genius...and eventually the reader believes you even if you haven't shown him to be genius. The techniques described in this work are no more genius beyond Statistics 102, and the skills employed are fully confessed to have been honed by sheer repetition, so where's the beef? A competent close-up magician of average intelligence could do this...genius it does not take.

But make no mistake, the book is a fun read. Those parts that are true are interesting and those parts that are embellished, compressed, or narrative devices are all forgivable.