Mit Students Blackjack

Everything started in 1979, when professional blackjack player Bill Kaplan was strolling through the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He found a flier that called for students to join the MIT Blackjack Club. The club was looking to capitalize on the new casinos in Atlantic City.

So, in 1980, an MIT consisting of 6 students and residents of the Burton-Conner House taught themselves card counting. They went to Atlantic City on a spring break, and won their fortune – they beat the casinos playing blackjack. Whether the MIT Blackjack Team was 'founded. In the 1980s' is in dispute. An article in The Tech, January 16, 1980, suggests that Roger Demaree and JP Massar were already running the team and teaching a hundred MIT students to play blackjack by the third week of the 1980s, implying that the team had been founded in the late 1970s, before. Famous blackjack team consisted of students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, and other prominent colleges who had come together to become one of the most successful teams in the history of card counting at the world of blackjack. In this 2008 film, Kevin Spacey trains a bunch of bright MIT students in blackjack tricks and card counting. They go on to take Las Vegas casinos for millions in winnings. The story is based on the real MIT Blackjack Team, formed in 1979, but the script of the film took a significant artistic license, to say the least.

As online blackjack is such a popular gambling game around the world, it’s no wonder that different people try their luck in this amusement, especially students. There can be numerous appealing offers for 18-25 years old guys and girl alike, who enjoy placing bets.

Blackjack – Huge Variety of Options

As there are a lot of options, it’s needed to highlight the most common versions you might come across:

• Chinese Blackjack – each player should collect at least 16 points, a dealer can reveal certain hands and hit further before even accepting new bets from players.
• Spanish 21 – also has a significant change in rules. The deck is 10 cards less (48 instead of 58). There are additional payouts and an opportunity to double down.
• European – this one is played with 4 decks. There can be a round of bets when the cards aren’t even dealt. If a dealer has an ace, it’s possible to buy an insurance (special bet) for players.
• Pontoon – is popular entertainment in Asia and Australia. The rules are quite similar to Spanish 21.
• Double Exposure Blackjack – the first two cards of the dealer are exposed.
• Pitch BJ – has a single deck.
• Multi-hand – it allows you to play up to 8 hands at once.

Online 21 with Real Bets

Any of these blackjack alternatives are not only for fun, but also for real money. The non-free modes are very popular, as they give an opportunity to not only entertain but get real winnings.

Practice Fun Mode

For newcomers or just the ones who want to play without the risk of losing money, there is a practice mode that requires no funds. From there, you can learn the basic rules and some peculiarities of the game.

Blackjack with Live Dealer

Recently a live dealer blackjack has appeared on the betting market, attracting thousands of excited customers. Such amusement has all the basics, but it’s enhanced with the presence of a live dealer, who deal hands (just like in land-based casino rooms). It’s quite unusual to have a real-time playing session with other people, with whom you can actually interact online.

Video Streaming

It gives casino customers an opportunity to watch the gaming process in high quality and real time. Dealers are situated all over the world, and you can play with them online. Just choose the resolution.

Player Options

There are various live dealer options for the player. However, they may differ from one staking hall to another. Usually, a gamer can choose the table by the photo of the croupier, with needed bet limits, languages, and even play in multiple windows at the same time.

Bonuses for Students

Web betting houses, which have a diverse audience (including students), offer different bonus programs for their customers. Such promotions greatly help during the gaming session, because of extra cash or free plays.

Match Deposit – 100%-200%

Matching deposit bonus has become a traditional encouragement in the majority of online betting houses. It adds some money to your balance, depending on how big is your deposit. For example, 100% (or even 200%) matching bonus will at least double the initially contributed sum.

Gifts for Pros

There are special rewards, like the high roller and VIP benefits, for customers who are experienced gamblers playing with large sums. With these promotions, you can get thousands of dollars as a reward.

Wagering Requirements for Each Bonus

For each kind of bonus, there will be specific demands you should satisfy, they’re called wagering requirements. Depending on the type and the size of the promotion, a player ought to wager a certain amount of money (up to even 50 times more, than the value of a given bonus). Only free spins for slots can be wager free, but read carefully informational block. Therefore, it’s better to become familiar with such tricky conditions before accepting anything.

Playing Blackjack for Crypto

Not so long time ago most of us have never thought about playing blackjack for something different than usual money. Welcome to the age of cryptocurrency! Every gambling platform now easily accepts Bitcoin. And reasons are quite clear: gamers can withdraw it much faster, having total anonymity.

The Way It Works

Mit Students And Blackjack

Besides the fact of depositing crypto money into account, but not the usual ones, bitcoin blackjack is completely the same. So, if you’re good in it, you can try your luck with some different rates.

Mobile Apps

There are plenty of crypto blackjack applications for mobile, so it wouldn’t be a problem for a real gambler to find his way to luck. Because of using Adobe Flash by developers, we can’t enjoy every game from cryptocurrency casinos on iOS, but still, the range is quite wide.

Card Counting in Blackjack

They say experienced gamers can derive some benefits when thoroughly following the flow of cards in BJ. Several mathematical algorithms can help beat the casino. Nowadays all betting houses are aware of such cheating methods and therefore they’ve created enhanced systems of detecting such players. However, there are some people who know how to overplay the dealer.

MIT Blackjack Team

One of the most infamous cases is the story of a team, which was made up of MIT students in 1979. They decided to discover a way to beat betting rooms at the 21 game. For many years, they were quite successful and their team significantly expanded. Its members played online BJ not only in the US, but worldwide and managed to return with outstanding sums of money.

Card Counting Online

As 21 is a game that has very little opportunities for cheating, especially online, it’s quite difficult to outplay the computer, which generates random numbers, by counting cards. New smart technologies, and the features of multiple decks in the shoe decrease opportunities for getting some advantage by predicting the possible outcome. It is unlikely to discover the results even in live dealer gambling houses, as shuffling is done regularly.

Blackjack Tournaments

There are even special tournaments for this game. Many players all over the world take part in them, as the prize is much higher than usual. One or several casinos together usually organize such tournaments. They can be seasonal, regular (daily or even hourly) or just periodically.

21 from Different Software Providers

As this amusement is so common on the gambling market, many providers make their own versions. Here are links for the best 21’s by different soft developers.

RTG

RTG is a supplier that has created various BJ games for different Internet gambling houses. The main advantages of its products are various configurable options and great graphics quality.

Rival

This company has few options for online blackjack, however, they are gilded with the most advanced features and high-end image quality.

Pragmatic Play

Being a relatively young brand in this industry, it’s already gained some following. Pragmatic Play makes such projects that are the easiest to access, allowing many users worldwide to enjoy its amusements.

Wagerworks (IGT)

Mit Students Blackjack Movie

Wagerworks creates games and whole platforms that can be used in various Internet betting cabinets. As a part of IGT, it’s considered a reliable software developer.

NetEnt

Mit Students Blackjack

NetEnt is a well-known provider of software for online betting rooms, its products are beloved by many gamblers, especially a series of BJ entertainment with a 3D look and useful options.

Playtech

The majority of online casinos choose Playtech versions of 21, as this company creates such entertainments, which allow selecting tables, hand numbers, and other features.

Microgaming

As the leading company in the online gambling industry, Microgaming offers a huge range of such card amusement. It’s developed many variations, so everyone can find a suitable option.

Blackjack Basic Strategy Chart Courtesy of CasinoGames.org

Andy ‘The Rock” Bloch is a well known poker player. He has earned over $4.1 million in career tournament earnings, but did you know that he was also a member of the infamous MIT Blackjack Team? He had already graduated from MIT (in l992) but had been accepted to Harvard Law School, and it was the Blackjack Team that funded his tuition (a hefty $41,500 a year), and all his living expenses, as well.

HOW IT ALL STARTED

In 1979 there was an Independent Activities Program offered to the MIT students called “How to Gamble if You Must.” It was just an informal club held on campus where students could apply their high IQs and beat each other at a variety of card games. It did not take these bright students long before they realized they could have fun and make some money doing it.

They did not have to be geniuses to realize that Blackjack was the game to play! In order to win at casino blackjack your cards must add up to 21 or be as close to 21 as possible without going over. If the house has a lower hand (total score) than you, or goes over 21, YOU WIN. If it’s a tie, then nobody wins. If the house gets 21, YOU LOSE.

The students at MIT just happened to be exceptionally intelligent students with a gift for mathematics and science. When they put this all together with cards, they quickly figured out that they could count cards with ease and that card counting techniques came naturally to them.

If a blackjack player counts the cards that are dealt to him, then an educated guess can be made about what cards have yet to be dealt. Using this information, a player can play accordingly and devise his next moves, determining whether to hit or stand. Gamblers attempt card counting all the time, but few can keep it up for very long. It requires intense concentration. A dealer can spot it really quickly, though. The MIT team used card counting only as the foundation of their system. They had a number of other tricks such as statistical probability of receiving high or low cards, and they had a technique for cutting cards that further put them in favor of the odds.

Mit Students Blackjack Book

By the 1990s the team, with investors to foot the Vegas weekend trips, were experiencing real success and their backers were enjoying big financial returns. Traveling as complete strangers to one another, they made up fake identities for each student. Playing this part and living the life of an alter ego was not only lucrative, but a lot of fun, as well, as you can imagine the adrenalin rush these kids had. For example, Semyon Dukach, a talented team member, who was born in Russia, used his accent and pretend that he was an arms dealer with lots of money to spend.

The players never drank, fraternized with each other, or with anyone else for that matter. They never visited brothels or strip clubs on these gambits and followed very strict rules as to how they behaved because time was too valuable, and they needed to be at their best, mentally. If you broke the rules, you were off the team, and this worked well for a while, but kids will be kids, and it was ultimately not following the rules that brought them down.

Every team member had a specific role to play in the system, and they would signal each another in a language of hand gestures and coded conversation, like you may have seen in the movie 21 that depicted their stories. One factoid about the movie, though, is that while it was pretty accurate, the gestures in the movie were not the identical ones that the team actually used, nor were the code words the same. What was dead on accurate was the representation of the experience for the players, for instance when they suddenly arrived in Vegas and felt that feeling like the world was their playground. The real members of the team say that this was the most moving part about watching the movie—remembering the feeling of power and opportunity.

And an opportunity it was. Flying back to Boston after a successful weekend, team members would have to hide their winnings to get it through security. Because it was a cash only business, tens of thousands of dollars had to be smuggled through the airport. Packs of money were strapped to their bodies and jammed into their pockets! But they didn’t win every time, as there were some pretty big losses from time to time, and some would even return empty handed and utterly disappointed.

ALL GOOD THINGS COME TO AN END

Like most people in their twenties, the MIT team thought they were bullet-proof. Eventually, though, carelessness would take them down. They lost their discipline and became complacent. The teams started to relax and have fun with each other out in public rather than adhering to the rules of their system. Instead of acting like they didn’t know each other, they were basking in their glory and partying together. What ultimately brought them down was a total chance spotting of some of them fooling around together at a Las Vegas hotel pool. Vegas is a small town, so it wasn’t long before their cover was blown.

Ironically, it was intelligence that helped the team beat the system, and it was intelligence and their own field of technology that ultimately bought them down. The casinos had hired the best in security surveillance to investigate the team, the Griffin Investigation Agency. This agency discovered that all these big blackjack winners were coming from the Cambridge area of Boston, Massachusetts, and it wasn’t long before the connection was made. With the aid of MIT Yearbooks and facial recognition detection technology, the players were abruptly stopped in their tracks, as investigators put an end to their fun. The last remaining team player was escorted from the table with the parting words, “You can’t play here. You’re too good for us.”

By that point, some of the students were meeting with professional makeup artists, but the disguises weren’t enough in the end. Wigs, baseball caps, even colored contacts could not fool the security officers who had kicked them out before and taken their photos. While it was over for them, as a team, some still played individually in casinos outside of Las Vegas.

Andy Bloch, Kati Lillenkamp, and Semyon Dukach decided to take a three-week junket and use their system of card counting in many of the best European casinos. They had great success in London and Paris. In Monte Carlo, they were winning big, but when Lillenkamp got up and left the table, security would not let her return, and before they knew it, Bloch and Dukach had security agents surrounding their tables, as well. All three of them had their photos taken and a call was placed to the Griffin Agency, as the agency’s database had gone worldwide on the Internet in order to prevent the team members from succeeding in fooling any other casinos. They were marked as known card counters and were told to leave Monaco immediately. They were also asked to never come back.

Mit Students Play Blackjack

Andy Bloch has said, “Once your face gets in the database as a known card counter, unless you want to have surgery, your career is pretty much over to any casino that subscribes to this database.”

Mit Students Blackjack Movie

One thing you might not know is that, at its pinnacle, the MIT team had as many as 80 players, but getting busted wasn’t the worst thing that happened to them. Since the end of their reign on Las Vegas, a great deal of money has been made off their story, as books, movies, and documentaries have told and re-told the incredible tale, depicting all the likely scenarios that may or may not have occurred during the time that the MIT students had their run. There’s just something so enthralling about the whole idea of these guys being smart enough to beat the casinos like that, and it’s all true. Had they not have been kids and been a bit more mature about the whole operation, they might not have been taken down, but there’s an old saying that all good things must come to an end.