Customer Reviews

Busting Vegas CD

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Mezrich's book is about a group of four select MIT students who utilize three blackjack card "tricks" to win loads of money from casinos around the world. Along the way they also lose large amounts to carelessness and casino security, as well as get arrested and beat here and there. Busting Vegas eventually ends with a "soft landing" after the ringleader crashlands a small plane and he and his partner incur minor burns rescuing their money from the burning plane, and then four members of the team end up getting married.

Interesting, or totally made-up? I don't know; what is for sure is that this is too much like "Bringing Down the House" - also involving MIT students, casinos, and blackjack. The story begins with an MIT recruitment fair for those interested in making money in casinos. The best candidates are selected to fill role models - rich, slightly drunk and crazy Russians who love to gamble. Their trick, however, is not card-counting but identifying the bottom-card as the dealer prepares to deal, cutting the deck EXACTLY 52 cards away (a skill presumably accomplished through a great deal of practice), and waiting for the kill. But first, they take over an entire table - either by asking the dealer to raise the limit or driving away others through their obnoxiousness.

If an ace is spotted, the team waits until the card is due for play, and then suddenly raise their bets. Similarly, a face card - this they apparently try to maneuver to hopefully bust the dealer. Initially the team wins about $20,000 in a Vegas trip, but eventually meets up with an investigator contracted to numerous casinos to investigate suspicious winnings. One of the team is beat, another interrogated. They stand silent, knowing that nothing is illegal.

On and on, around the world. The PI increasingly keeps foiling their efforts, faxing their photos or identifying them to others. They are barred from playing in London, and arrested and beaten in Monte Carlo.

Validity: Not only does the plot suffer from being almost a Xerox of "Bringing Down the House," the system is so simple that the great mathematical talent prerequisite for being on the team really isn't needed. Further, one wonders how they can take so much time off from class for their globe-trotting. An interesting story, but one wonders whether it should be categorized as "Fiction."

This is an entertaining book, and a fast read. I tore through it, not only because it isn't very long, but also because the author has a simple, easy-to-read style. Mezrich is quite effective at weaving a good story.

It's obvious that the author is making up a lot of the details in the book, because the main character could not possibly have remembered all the dialogue and details recounted in the book. The cheesy "romance" between Semyon and Allie added nothing at all to the book and really should have been left out.

The ending, featuring an afterword from Semyon himself, insults the reader's intelligence. He claims they were out on a crusade to bust the evil casinos. Well, I hate to break it to you Semyon, but the casinos kicked you out long before you did any real damage to their bottom lines. And unlike what Semyon suggests, there's nothing to indicate that the team was on a Robin Hood mission--they weren't giving the money to the poor, or using it to fund counseling for problem gamblers. The kicker of it all is that Semyon suggests that he was motivated by open-source software to share his discoveries. If that were really true, Semyon wouldn't be hawking $40 DVDs in the book; instead, he would freely share exactly how to execute his "techniques."

Despite the factual gloss and Semyon's apparent self-delusions, the book is a fun way to spend a few days of reading time. I'd recommend it if you enjoyed "Bringing Down the House," though that earlier title is superior.

if this book were simply an exciting fast-paced story (albeit poorly written), i would rate it 2 stars

unfortunately, about halfway through it goes moralistic with dripping hypocrisy - an unnecessary element i found annoying. an example from page 151:

"'okay,' victor said as he surveyed the group, lined up on the balcony, blue water behind them, the glass casino glowing on the horizon. 'let's show this little island what a bit of math, in the right hands, can do to balance out a few hundred years of economic oppression, shall we?'

semyon grinned, and barely felt the pinch of his still bruised lower lip. robin hood had nothing on them"

just like robin hood - except they keep the money for themselves (MIT/harvard students)

the 'afterword' takes the ridiculous moral justification a few steps further. an example from page 283/4:

"for me and my teammates, beating the casinos has never been entirely about the money. of course the money was important, and on the surface, the whole enterprise may have even resembled a kind of crazy financial start-up on steroids, but anyone looking deeper would have seen that for us, the blackjack team was not a business, but a passionate, desperate struggle against the mighty evil empire that was and continues to be the casino industry... inspired by the success of open source, i've come to believe that to really make a substantial impact against a powerful adversary like the casino industry, you have to sacrifice the short term profits of a select few in order to enable the masses to cooperate and innovate... once this book is published, millions of people will get exposure to some of our key methods"

uhhh.. what?!!!! the book is glammed to the max with regard to gambling (the cover is no anomaly) and somehow it's still a "desperate struggle against the mighty evil empire"? comparing casino cheating to a productive venture - like a startup or successful open source teams - is ridiculous

with a world of other books to read, i do not recommend this one

I won't bother guessing how much of this book is fact versus fiction -- even as pure fiction, it's enjoyable to read, similar in style to Mezrich's earlier 21: Bringing Down the House - Movie Tie-In: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. The three winning techniques described in the book sound plausible, at least in theory, and I wouldn't be surprised if most casinos really were oblivious to shuffle tracking and precise shoe cutting when the events supposedly took place.

However, as much as I like Mezrich's breezy style of writing, he makes lots of mistakes when describing the blackjack action itself. If you're not an experienced blackjack player, you probably won't notice or care, but over and over I was brought out of the story with a "WTF?" moment. One such example comes in the epilogue: "The dealer flipped over her down card, a ten, for a fourteen. She asked if I wanted to hit either of my hands." Um, was Mezrich playing double exposure? Mistakes like this make me wonder if Mezrich has ever really played a single hand of blackjack. Other errors are more subtle, like confusing first base with third, or describing a push as a win.

The worst technical mistake is Mezrich's description of the supposed mathematical advantage of the first technique. Somehow he comes up with a whopping 45% advantage for six hands. Even taking at face value his claim that an ace gives one hand a 51% advantage, playing five other hands at a -2% disadvantage gives an expected value of (0.51-0.10)/6 per hand, or about 6.8%. After reading Mezrich go on and on about Semyon's math skills, it's ridiculous to see the author make such a glaring error the first time he tries to explain the math.

as racily written as his earlier book. This time around the motivation to write the story is also, supposedly, to even the playing field between casinos and the average joe who loses money consistently (mathematically consistent, or consistent with the level of his/her stupidity).

1. If anyone reads the book and thinks that they have a method to beat the system. They should get their head checked or should get off the prescription drug they are consuming.
2. Semyon, the hero of the book, in his afterword says that he was inspired by the open source era to share his secrets and encourages more people to get into the game of busting casino. This seems to be a diabolic invitation to idiots to spend more time in casino/lose more money.
3. The writer's perspective is of an awe stricken nitwit, the reader is also expected to assume the part. Hopefully, someone will come along and write a book from a pure math standpoint or pure cutthroat casino/player's standpoint, both perspectives would be more rewarding. a half baked, aren't these guys genius perspective is a waste of a good reader's time.

This book has one thing going for it; it's interesting. This is a plus, because most of us who read after work and on weekends aren't looking to be bored to sleep.

However, beyond that, this book is complete garbage. After reading the first 10 pages I knew that this is a work of almost total fiction. Mezrich might want to get Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair on speed dial, because if there's any journalistic integrity left out there, he's gonna need their advice on how to come through scandal unscathed.

There are errors throughout the book that anyone with half a brain can pick out. Dates are routinely made up. The 'characters' refer to movies that weren't out at the supposed time of the events (Braveheart, Gladiator). The guy doesn't even make an effort to portray distances correctly. The next time I take a 40 minute limo trip from Newark Airport to Atlantic City will be the first, and a world record at that.

I've never seen a work of non-fiction on Amazon where the supposed main character has to log in and write a review of the book, just to try and prop up what little credibility the author has.

My only solace is that I borrowed this book from the library rather than buy it and pad this storyteller's bank account.

I read this in the middle of law school exams, so take everything that follows with a grain of salt - it's a very quick read, entertaining, but much weaker than the previous blackjack book he wrote, "Bringing Down the House." The story follows another incarnation of the clandestine (not so much anymore) MIT teams that come around every-so-often, only this time, the technique is not card-counting in the conventional sense, but a something else. One reviewer likened it Mezrich's style to that of a movie, and it's a fair analogy. It's fast with no real regard to language in and of itself. Anyone looking to take their minds off whatever they are doing will enjoy this. Might be perfect for a flight home because you can finish it in a few hours.