More on 21
March 29th, 2008What I found most accurate in 21 was the portrayal of feelings. The feeling of being introduced to the team, the hard work training (can you say Rocky?), the exhaustion after playing all night, the rags to riches to rags feelings when we’d go from MIT student to high roller and back again, and the sick feeling of losing, are all spot on.
Many teammate’s first reaction upon going to a casino to play blackjack was “Everyone plays so stupidly!” True enough. But knowing how to play does not equate to being financially successful. Many of those “stupid” players make enough money in the real world that their losses, though perhaps horrifying for a poor student, are irrelevant to them. Well, maybe not — I suspect that many of these players lose enough to say “ouch!”
Their second reaction was “This is so easy compared to the checkout.” Bill Kaplan, a Harvard business school grad and college classmate of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, instituted checkouts and controls that created winning players from the group of MIT amateurs. Everyone involved should have felt confident that any player who passed the checkout would be playing a good game. As the years went on and conditions became tougher, I tried to keep pace with improved checkouts and reporting. Mike Aponte says my refinements made a world of difference. My feeling is that it’s a bit more nuanced than that. Our checkouts for counting got very good, but checkouts for other techniques still left something to be desired. Hence our poor performance on the fancy techniques.
Being able to earn a living playing blackjack (or poker, for that matter) does enable you to step back and re-evaluate your life. No longer must you put in long hours at a job, just to meet your financial obligations. You can spend time on things because you want to, because you have a passion for it, not because you “have to”. Some people consider this a curse, others a blessing; in both cases, they’re right!
Many elements of the movie do have an element of truth to them, perhaps more than the scriptwriters knew. Like the other teammate I sat with said “What happened to Ben in the 2.09 contest is exactly what happened to me in my 6.111 project. As a result of putting too much time into blackjack, he got dumped by his partner, who then went on to win the contest. I had never known that, and I doubt that anyone involved in the production did either.
Many of the players on the team did in fact compete in a robotics contest (2.70, now 2.007). There are two women on the team who might have some claim to be the basis of Jill. The most likely, Katie, almost won the 2.70 contest the year she entered. The strategy her entry used was clearly superior, but her machine broke after about the sixth contest. With about 5 minutes to repair it, she was unable to continue. Katie was interviewed in the History Channel’s Breaking Vegas. The other is Sarah, though her involvement ended well before Jeff Ma ever joined the team. But Sarah’s backstory is identical Jill’s: she was an applied math major, and worked at JPL as a rocket scientist. She also founded the west coast branch of the team. She was pretty and nice enough that most guys could hardly believe she was an MIT student (or rocket scientist). [Update: Jane Willis claims to be the basis for Kate Bosworth's character. Jane was just a spotter, and a career lawyer who dabbled in blackjack for a short time. Personally, I don't see it, but she did put Jeff Ma and Ben Mezrich together. Update: Ok, I re-read Bringing Down the House, and the Jill character is clearly modeled after Jane. The movie adaptation alters the character enough that the connection is no longer evident; only the name remains. The same is true for Mickey Rosa.]
Even Newton’s method was something that was important to me. It was the heart of the “solver” that I wrote for Premise, the software company that I was one of the founders of. Although Premise never made it, its president (and teammate of mine), Jon Hirschtick, went on to found Solidworks.
Though Ben Campbell is supposedly modeled after Jeff Ma, I thought two other players fit his character better (especially since he wasn’t Asian): James Schuyler, and TomJ. James was a lightning calculator. TomJ did his 6.111 contest thing, and turned 21 shortly after being trained.
I guess when the real team was something like 200 people over 20+ years, many plausible scenarios would be reasonably likely to have happened.
Here’s a story about the MIT team that hasn’t received much notice. Many stories remain untold. The MIT team is only one group of players who’ve beaten the casinos, and even within that group, you’ve seen only the tip of the iceberg.
Here’s a pretty well-researched review of the movie. There are only a few minor inaccuracies:
- I was never a professor.
- JP Massar is of Italian descent, not Asian
- James Grosjean was assaulted by Imperial Palace security.
- Our betting unit was never $10000. At most it might have been $2000, and most of the time it was $1000 or less.
