Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Ben Mezrich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 2003

#1 National Bestseller!

The amazing inside story about a gambling ring of M.I.T.students who beat the system in Vegas -- and lived to tell how.

Robin Hood meets the Rat Pack when the best and the brightest of M.I.T.'s math students and engineers take up blackjack under the guidance of an eccentric mastermind. Their small blackjack club develops from an experiment in counting cards on M.I.T.'s campus into a ring of card savants with a system for playing large and winning big. In less than two years they take some of the world's most sophisticated casinos for more than three million dollars. But their success also brings with it the formidable ire of casino owners and launches them into the seedy underworld of corporate Vegas with its private investigators and other violent heavies.

Filled with tense action, high stakes, and incredibly close calls, Bringing Down the House is a nail-biting read that chronicles a real-life Ocean's Eleven. It's one story that Vegas does not want you to read.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Shy, geeky, amiable" MIT grad Kevin Lewis, was, Mezrich learns at a party, living a double life winning huge sums of cash in Las Vegas casinos. In 1993 when Lewis was 20 years old and feeling aimless, he was invited to join the MIT Blackjack Team, organized by a former math instructor, who said, "Blackjack is beatable." Expanding on the "hi-lo" card-counting techniques popularized by Edward Thorp in his 1962 book, Beat the Dealer, the MIT group's more advanced team strategies were legal, yet frowned upon by casinos. Backed by anonymous investors, team members checked into Vegas hotels under assumed names and, pretending not to know each other, communicated in the casinos with gestures and card-count code words. Taking advantage of the statistical nature of blackjack, the team raked in millions before casinos caught on and pursued them. In his first nonfiction foray, novelist Mezrich (Reaper, etc.), telling the tale primarily from Kevin's point of view, manages to milk that threat for a degree of suspense. But the tension is undercut by the first-draft feel of his pedestrian prose, alternating between irrelevant details and heightened melodrama. In a closing essay, Lewis details the intricacies of card counting.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

For the first third of his nonfiction debut, novelist Mezrich craps out. Ground lights viewed from an airplane aren't just pinpricks, or even little pinpricks, but "tiny little pinpricks." Las Vegas tourism facts are crammed onto the pages like seven decks in a six-deck shoe. But Mezrich finally hits the jackpot on page 79, when M.I.T. student Kevin Lewis steps onto the floor of the Mirage. The book stays on a roll as it describes how the young gambler and his card-counting cohorts employ simple math and complex disguises to win nearly $4 million at the blackjack tables. Bouncing from huge scores to frightening banishments, the M.I.T. team fights a winning battle against the law of averages--until they're forced to flee south like Butch and Sundance from the gaming industry's Joe LeFors. Although Mezrich's prose never rises above serviceable (and he pointlessly injects himself into the narrative at every turn), the story he tells will grip anyone who has ever hoped to break the bank at Monte Carlo. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 257 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; First Edition edition (September 9, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743249992
• ASIN: B001AQY05Y
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (451 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #194,351 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm the author of nine books, at the moment, including Bringing Down The House, The True Story of Six MIT kids Who Took Vegas- which sort of made me a vegas expert. I live in Boston with my fiance and pug, Bugsy.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#56 in Kindle eBooks > Business & Investing

#79 in Books > Business & Investing

#99 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs

#56 in Kindle eBooks > Business & Investing

#79 in Books > Business & Investing

#99 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

183 of 210 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Pro Player Says This Book Busts February 14, 2004

By Joshua Axelrad

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Author Ben Mezrich is on the streak of a lifetime, with his top-selling, wildly flawed, heavily fictionalized "history" of a well-known blackjack team getting made into a movie by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Pretty impressive. MGM, after all, as Mezrich notes in a recent interview, is "the same company that owns most of the large casinos in Vegas." (See the February, 2004 Kuro5hin interview at [...]) The only problem with this observation, like many of the major and minor details in Mezrich's book, is that it isn't true. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the movie company, and MGM Mirage, the casino company, are totally separate corporations, just as Mezrich's Las Vegas and the real Nevada town are totally different. Mezrich may be the only gambling writer in America who doesn't know these elementary facts.

For four years I've supported myself and my family by counting cards in American casinos and winning at blackjack. It is a tense, weird, exhilirating life, and I would love for more of my friends to understand it. This book doesn't help. Not only is the grade-school prose tedious. Not only are the technical blackjack details, on those few occasions when Mezrich summons the pluck to try tackling them, incorrect or misleading. The dramatic structure gropes and falls flat. The journalism is scandalously lazy and erroneous. Above all, the spirit, the eclat that card counters muster to wage our little war against casinoland is missing. Mezrich doesn't get it and can't report it. He hasn't been there and he doesn't know, his scanty experimental plays with MIT alums notwithstanding. If you want to know what gamblers are like and how we live, skip this drivel.

Look instead at legendary hustler Amarillo Slim's new memoir, Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People.... Look at Jesse May's insuperable poker novel, Shut Up and Deal, which more than any other book depicts the dark heart of the professional player. If it's blackjack history and the activities of the major teams you're into, read Ken Uston. If you want to understand the technical aspects of the game, get Don Schlesinger, Arnold Snyder, Peter Griffin, and, for old time's sake, Ed Thorpe. If you want to learn how a notorious high-stakes counter makes his way in the world, read Ian Andersen's Burning the Tables in Las Vegas. There's so much good gambling writing out there, with so much real-life experience underlying it, that wasting time and money on Mezrich is a sucker's bet. Read more ›

95 of 108 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beating the odds and living a constant adrenaline high! May 3, 2003

By Linda Linguvic HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

This is a fast and explosive read. It's a true story that's so high-powered that the tension never ceases and I was thrust into a roller coaster ride that kept my eyes glued to the pages.

The story is told through the eyes of the author, who met one of the students at a party and was so intrigued by his outrageous tale that he was compelled to put it into a book. This is a story of a group of math whizzes, most of Asian descent, who used the art of card counting, worked as teams, and legally won as much as 4 million dollars during the few years they spent their weekends in the Vegas casinos, living the high life.

They strapped thousands of dollars to their bodies with Velcro to get the cash onto planes, used false names, and were always on the lookout for Las Vegas personnel who would sometimes personally escort them out of the casinos. They also learned about the seediness of the gambling world, greed, the way the Vegas corporations work. Of course they all went through changes. And eventually, it had to come to an end. Some of it is kind of scary too. But mostly, it's about beating the odds and living with a constant adrenaline high.

Well, reading this book is an adrenaline high of it's own. It put me right into the action and kept me there for the whole 257 pages. I loved it. And highly recommend it.

82 of 94 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Cardiac meds needed for Mezrich's thrilling ride November 21, 2002

By "bsammons7"

Format:Hardcover

As a physician I have my fill of non-fiction with an abundance of journals so when I read for relaxation I want a story that keeps me excited, interested and sleepless until it is finished. Bringing Down the House is such a book and reads like a Clancy or Pollock with a little lower body count, but with no less excitement.

Ben Mezrich is superb writer and story teller with the amazing ability to weave the excitement of a Las Vegas casino, the mathmetics of card counting with enjoyable interpersonal dynamics so that this is a consuming story with people you care about. His description of the high roller lifestyle in Vegas takes you to the tables playing sums you watch others wager with the adrenaline rush like you were part of the team. I bought the book in Boston having just missed him at a book signing and had a hardtime finishing the conference. I found myself in the room reading a book I could not put down instead of going out in one of the towns in which the story was set. It was that engrossing.

My Christmas list now contains all of his previous writings as this is an author who knows how to tell a story.

45 of 50 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Overheated prose, engaging story...and a big mystery... September 2, 2004

By Craig Kenneth Bryant

Format:Paperback

...namely, how much of this tale to believe?

But first, the basics: "Kevin" joins a team of Blackjack players based out of MIT, and extracts some ungodly number of dollars from the casinos over the course of a five-year romp. Then the casinos wise up to the game, and start putting the squeeze on Kevin and his buddies: expulsions, IRS audits, intimidation, and a little rough stuff in back rooms.

Ben Mezrich is a thriller-writer by day, and the prose is a bit too ripely melodramatic--cliff-hanger chapter endings that go nowhere, visual metaphors culled from Raymond Chandler's wastebasket: "the muscles beneath his MIT T-shirt rippled like a plastic trash can left out in a heat wave." (And just when did everyone at MIT get so darned _ripped_? Almost everyone's a stud or a babe, except for the shadowy Asian ringleader with the horrible teeth and bad vision. Must be a different part of campus than I usually see.) But he manages to keep the writing at a good poolside or plane-time level, and you can skim the bits that are obviously padded out to stretch a 150-page story into a 250-page book.

The Blackjack itself seems mostly reasonable. The kids practice the classic "Hi-Lo" count, but with a clever twist. Hi-Lo calls for the player to bet the minimum a lot of the time, then dramatically raise the betting level when the distribution of cards turns favorable. One thing this isn't, is inconspicuous--the casinos are good at spotting this stuff. So the MIT gang fielded two types of players--some always bet low, but kept track of the "count." When it became favorable, these players would give the high-sign to a "Gorilla" or "Big Player," who always bet high, and sat at a hot table until the count went bad again.... Then the Big Player would drift off and look for the next signal. Nobody ever altered their betting levels; but the high-rollers just seemed to magically land at one hot table after another.

It sounds like a pretty good scheme...even a bit like some of the tactics Blackjack writer Stanford Wong talks about. I guess it could work.

The trouble is that too much of the story just doesn't seem to wash. My spider-sense started tingling early in the book, when a character grabbed two martinis off a passing cocktail waitress's tray...like she was passing them around at a catered party. Now, I'm no Vegas-hound, but I've never known the cocktail service at a casino to work that way. And this happens two or three times over the course of the narrative. It's a small thing, almost trivial...but definitively _wrong._ I don't think a writer who's done his homework will miss something like that.

And now that I was thinkig suspiciously, a whole lot of things started smelling fishy. Let me mention a few:

--The team is continually faced with the challenge of moving as much as $600,000 across the country from Boston to Vegas and back, week after week. They have to employ all kinds of subterfuge to get the cash through airport security--hollow laptops, fake casts, ziplock bags in their underwear. Well, why bother? That money is working capital, not profit--why doesn't it just stay in Nevada, in a string of deposit boxes? They mention using _some_ bank boxes, so why run the risk of looking like drug runners?

--The team is forever staying in comped "high roller" suites in big-name casinos: hot tubs, bottle of champagne waiting on arrival, limos to the airport, the whole nine yards. Uhh, way not to attract attention, guys. You can have a safe room just a few steps off the strip for a hundred bucks or less. In a game where once the casinos know your game, it's over, why would "professionals" take these kinds of outrageous risks just to get a free room?

--In fact, to heck with staying in hotels. With the kind of money this book is talking about, the smart investment would be a house, somewhere in the sleepier suburbs of Clark county. Then you'd never have to worry about making one absolute rookie mistake the MIT team makes--counting cards in the same place you're sleeping. It makes for a dramatic scene with hotel security, but it doesn't make a lick of sense. Heck, even _I_ know enough not to do that.

I could go on, but you get the idea. All of these little oddities and inconsistencies make no sense except for one thing--they all serve to sex up the storyline, make it more exotic, more James Bond...make it sell more books. Hmmm. I know a little bit about the proud traditions of tall tales and practical jokes at MIT and Harvard (the author's alma mater). At the end of the day, I have to think that there's more Vegas razzle-dazzle than journalistic truth in here.

But hey, don't we go to casinos to believe in a fantasy? At fourteen bucks, this is one of the cheaper Las Vegas illusions you can buy. Read more ›