Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees [Hardcover]

Ben Mezrich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 27, 2005

He played in casinos around the world with a plan to make himself richer than anyone could possibly imagine -- but it would nearly cost him his life.

Semyon Dukach was known as the Darling of Las Vegas. A legend at age twenty-one, this cocky hotshot was the biggest high roller to appear in Sin City in decades, a mathematical genius with a system the casinos had never seen before and couldn't stop -- a system that has never been revealed until now; that has nothing to do with card counting, wasn't illegal, and was more powerful than anything that had been tried before.

Las Vegas. Atlantic City. Aruba. Barcelona. London. And the jewel of the gambling crown -- Monte Carlo.

Dukach and his fellow MIT students hit them all and made millions. They came in hard, with stacks of cash; big, seemingly insane bets; women hanging on their arms; and fake identities. Although they were taking classes and studying for exams during the week, over the weekends they stormed the blackjack tables only to be harassed, banned from casinos, threatened at gunpoint, and beaten in Vegas's notorious back rooms.

The stakes were high, the dangers very real, but the players were up to the challenges, consequences be damned. There was Semyon Dukach himself, bored with school and broke; Victor Cassius, the slick, brilliant MIT grad student who galvanized the team; Owen Keller, with stunning ability but a dark past that would catch up to him; and Allie Simpson, bright, clever, and a feast for the eyes.

In the classroom, they were geeks. On the casino floor, they were unstoppable.

Busting Vega$ is Dukach's unbelievably true story; a riveting account of monumental greed, excess, hubris, sex, love, violence, fear, and statistics that is high-stakes entertainment at its best.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Semyon Dukach couldn't believe how easy the money was. In one weekend, the MIT math genius and his team of geeks had made $200,000 playing the blackjack tables in Las Vegas. They hadn't cheated. Instead, they had discovered one of humanity's greatest holy grails: a system to beat the casino. They had rendered obsolete the old saying that the house always wins. Dukach and his friends made millions during the 1990s playing blackjack in the world's top casinos, right under the noses of pit bosses and security consultants who thought they had seen it all. Dukach's story is told in author Ben Mezrich's vividly narrated book Busting Vegas.

Mezrich, the author of previous bestsellers about MIT gamblers and a colorful Ivy League trader in Japan, tells how Dukach's crew used a system that Vegas had never seen before. Dukach, the son of Russian immigrants who grew up in the poorest neighborhoods of New Jersey and Houston, was determined to climb out of poverty and help his family. His system didn't involve the commonly used techniques of card counting. Posing as an arms dealer or dentist, Dukach deliberately sought out blackjack dealers with small hands or thin fingers who frequently didn't conceal the bottom card when they shuffled the cards. Dukach would often manage to get a glimpse at the bottom card. This was highly significant because it was the card the dealer would hand the player to cut the deck. Dukach had practiced a technique to insert the card in a precise spot in the deck and then make big bets when the card was dealt. Dukach and his team ended up barred from casinos, threatened at gunpoint, and beaten in Vegas's notorious back rooms. This is a riveting yarn. —Alex Roslin

About the Author

Ben Mezrich has published ten books, including the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House (now a Sony picture starring Kevin Spacey). He is a columnist for Boston Common and a contributor for Flush magazine (London). He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1ST edition (September 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060575115
• ISBN-13: 978-0060575113
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #537,784 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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The thrilling read you would expect from a Mezrich book, December 6, 2005

By 

Jessica Lux (Rosamond, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees (Hardcover)

Mezrich broke onto the bestseller list with his account of an MIT blackjack uber-card counting team that hit Vegas for big money (in 2003's Bringing Down the House). Now he's back with a another MIT-whiz kid blackjack scam, only this one is even more unbelievable and over-the-top. People have heard of the card counters discussed in Mezrich's first book, but the three types of play desribed in Busting Vegas are going to be brand-new to most readers. So new, in fact, that they may seem unbelievable.

These blackjack techniques (or scams, depending on your point of view) involve as much math as they do shuffle-watching and precise card-cutting. It's a marriage of the intense math required for card counting and the near-impossible perfect moves required in a roulette or craps scam. Complete control of an entire table by the team is required, so that a known card can be directed to hit on the appropriate hand. No random players can be sitting at the table taking cards out of the shuffle.

As with the other MIT scam, the players have to take on fake identities. In this scam, however, it is essential that everyone be a big roller, a "whale." Just watching the insane Russian arms dealer, trust-fund brat, and European rock star characters these guys take around the Strip is entertaining.

Is Mezrich's account to be taken as the literal truth? Of course not! Names have been changed and the story has been spiced up to read like a Grisham novel. Semyon Dukatch himself has said that the story captures the "essense" of his experience. This isn't meant to be 100% truth, and it would probably be a heck of a lot more dry reading if someone had told every literal fact from start to finish. Mezrich's cinematic style, full of highs and lows for the characters, makes for compelling reading.

Enjoy this as a great novel about whiz kids beating the establishment of the casinos (for a short while), and don't worry too much about where the line between fact and fiction is.

25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not playing with a full deck, March 31, 2006

By 

Samuel Louis "raisindot" (Natick, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees (Hardcover)

One would like to believe that a group of MIT students truly did take Vegas for millions as Ben Mezrich claims. But in a era when diarists and autobiographers are routinely getting caught in lies, it's very difficult to believe this story. First, it reads like a bad pulp novel, filled with every possible B-movie cliche--security room beatings, casino owners waving guns in their faces on Aruban golf courses, swarthy Europeans threatening to kill them if they ever come back to Monte Carlo. Mix in a cast of characters straight out of central casting--the Russian math genius, the bombshell blond, the screwup with a drug problem, the obese nerd, and the charismatic mystery "leader" who hides hundreds of thousands of dollars in laundry baskets all over the greater Boston area. Then add sexual misunderstandings and B-movie "dialogue," and the author's own self-indulgent "visits" to Vegas brothels and casinos to "retrace" the kids' journey, and you get a far-fetched potboiler seemingly untethered to verifiable facts. Why, for example, did Mezrich not interview the kids' nemesis, a Vegas private eye who follows their movements and foils their plans everywhere they go? Why are there no interviews with security guards and casino managers who roughed them up in Vegas, Aruba, and Monte Carlo? How do we can believe that any of these people even existed, and that any of this is true, when Mezrich swallows their tale hook line and sinker? Read this entertaining but ultimally vacuous trifle for what it is--all bluff and fluff.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Clever, but terribly written, June 25, 2007

By 

Andrew Otwell "heyotwell" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees (Hardcover)

This is a fun little summer read. Smarty-pants MIT geeks figure out some ways to count cards in blackjack, and win it all! Then, of course, it all comes crashing down! The clever methods turn out to be more or less brute force: count and commit stuff to memory, then time your bets just right. I guess I was hoping for something more MIT-worthy.

Unfortunately, this book is so badly-written it's almost unbearable to read. I wasn't expecting great non-fiction, but this is *bad*. Here's an example: describing a "grueling" month of training the team goes through before hitting Vegas, we're told that the students made "biweekly" trips to a local casino. Really? Two whole trips isn't exactly "grueling" training. (Maybe the author meant "twice weekly"?) This is followed by "every ten days, the team endured 'checkouts'"--basically pop quizzes. Every *ten* days? So...that makes three times during this so-called intense month? This doesn't exactly paint a picture of the team grinding away in Boston in preparation for the big score, it sounds kinda like some kids playing cards every once in a while.

The whole book can't seem to strike the right tone of reality. This *is* a true story, but it isn't told straight. Details are needlessly specific (how many books on a bookcase, the color of a pair of shoes, how good a cup of tea is, and so on). But these are details that aren't just irrelevant to the story, but impossible to recall. It's clear that the author is simply filling in information here in hopes that it all seems more "real". Problem is, it's not possible to tell when these details *are* real, and so everything seems equally fake, and you end up wondering: when Owen was in that secret back room at the casino, did he really get beat up and handcuffed? Did the security team really threaten him like that? Or are those details just imagined, too? If this was pure fiction, it'd be ok, but in a supposedly non-fiction book, it feels mostly made-up.