Hacking Las Vegas

[Wise Young]

We need this guy on our side.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vegas.html

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Hacking Las Vegas

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE MIT BLACKJACK TEAM'S CONQUEST OF THE CASINOS.

By Ben Mezrich

The Back-Spotter
The Back-Spotter can count cards without even being seated at the blackjack table. When the count gets hot - meaning the house is at a statistical disadvantage - this player will signal for the team's bettors to swoop in.

The Spotter
The Spotter counts cards while playing at the table. Casinos screen for counters by watching for dramatic rises or drops in bets - a sure sign that a deck has gone hot or cold. A Spotter avoids detection by resolutely sticking to the minimum bet on each hand. When it's time to start betting big to take advantage of a favorable deck, he tips off his teammates.

The Gorilla
The Gorilla doesn't count at all: He just bets big, all the time. Typically, he adopts the pose of a drunken millionaire who has green to burn. The Spotters ensure the Gorilla's "luck" by steering him to tables where he's got greater than even odds of winning against the house.

The Big Player
The Big Player appears to be a type well known to the casinos: the high-rolling recreational gambler who's content to slowly bleed his money away through hours of competent play. In reality, he's a Spotter with a Gorilla's bankroll. He's not only counting cards, he's tracking the shuffle for the high cards that rob the house of its advantage. A BP always plays a good deck, so he never has to lower his bets by much.

Fifty thousand dollars strapped to each thigh. A hundred thousand dollars, in 10 bricks of hundreds, taped across my upper back. Fifty thousand more Velcroed to my chest.


F. Scott Schafer
From left: The back-spotter (standing); the spotter (in yellow); the gorilla(center); the big player (far right).

I try to control my breathing as I stroll through Logan International Airport. Terminal C is buzzing and chaotic, an over-air-conditioned hive of college students escaping Boston for a long weekend. I am dressed like everyone else: baggy jeans, baseball hat, scuffed sneakers. But in my mind, I have as much chance of blending in as a radioactive circus clown. There's enough money hidden under my clothes to buy a two-bedroom condo. And to top it off, there's $100,000 worth of yellow plastic casino chips jammed into the backpack slung over my right shoulder.

My anxiety increases as I reach the security checkpoint. I want to turn and run, but the security guard is staring at me, and I have no choice: I show him my ticket. America West, flight 69, Boston to Vegas. The Friday night Neon Express.

He gestures with his head, and I drop my backpack onto the conveyor belt. I know the chips will show up on the X-ray machine, but even if the guard makes me open the backpack, he won't realize how much money the yellow hunks of plastic represent.

The $100 bills are another matter. This is an airport; they can drag me to a windowless room in the basement and handcuff me to a chair. They can confiscate my stash, call in the DEA, FBI, and IRS. It will be up to me to prove that I'm not a drug dealer. To customs agents, $100 bills smell like cocaine.

In reality, I'm a writer, with six pulpy thrillers under my belt, but today I'm on the scent of a real life story even more high-octane than any of my fictional jaunts. I'm ferrying money for Kevin Lewis, one of the best card counters alive. He's taking me back to his glory days when he ran a card team that hit Vegas for millions.

The guard doesn't seem to be bothered by the bulges under my clothes. He waves me through the metal detector, and I stumble toward my gate.

My heart rate has almost returned to normal when I spot Lewis standing near the back of the line of college kids waiting to board flight 69. He doesn't look up, waiting until I am right next to him to show me the edges of a mischievous grin.

"Pretty intense," he says.

I nod. His voice is full of bravado, a stark contrast to his appearance. Dressed in a gray sweatshirt and khaki shorts, Lewis looks like a stereotypical college student. His features are ethnic, but beyond that, indeterminate. He could be Asian, Latino, even Italian or Russian. He is a carbon copy of thousands of other kids who call Boston home.

"There's got to be an easier way to carry your stake," I finally say, adjusting the bricks of $100 bills that are sliding down my legs.

"Sure," Lewis responds. "We went through a gadget phase. You know, James Bond kind of stuff. But hollow crutches are a lot harder to explain to the FBI than Velcro."He isn't joking.

The truth is, Kevin Lewis isn't his real name. This amiable kid lived a double life for more than four years. In Boston, he was a straight-A engineering major at MIT. In Las Vegas, he was something more akin to a rock star. He partied with Michael Jordan and Howard Stern. He dated a cheerleader from the Los Angeles Rams and got drunk with Playboy centerfolds. He was chased off a riverboat in Louisiana and narrowly avoided being thrown into a Bahamian jail. He was audited by the IRS, tailed by private investigators, and had his picture faxed around the globe.

Along the way, he amassed a small fortune, which he keeps in neat stacks of Benjamins in a closet by his bed. It's rumored he made somewhere between $1 million and $5 million.

THE BABY-FACED CARD COUNTERS TURNED "21" INTO A HIGH-ROLLING ARBITRAGE GAME.

For six years in the 1990s, Lewis was a principal member of the MIT Blackjack Team, an infamous cabal of hyper-geniuses and anarchistic whiz kids who devised a method of card counting that took the gaming world completely by surprise. Funded, in part, by shadowy investors and trained in mock casinos set up in classrooms, dingy apartments, and underground warehouses across Boston, Lewis and his gang used their smarts to give themselves an incredible advantage at the only truly beatable game in the pit. A baby-faced card-counting team possessed with impressive mathematical skills - here was a novelty that turned blackjack into an arbitrage opportunity. Their system was so successful, it took nearly two years before the casinos began to catch on - engaging in a cat-and-mouse war with the well-trained MIT conspirators.

To the casinos, there's no difference between legal card counters like Lewis, who use their brains to beat the game, and the brash, increasingly high tech cheaters who steal tens of millions of dollars from the resorts every year. In response, the casinos have developed equally sophisticated means of identifying, tracking, and eliminating their enemies: i.e., anyone who doesn't consistently lose.

"It's Robin Hood against the Sheriff," Lewis says, summing it up as we wait with the Vegas-bound crowd. It's an interesting analogy, yet it falls severely short. In this story Robin Hood is stealing from the rich to give to himself. And the sheriff has a thousand eyes, covering every inch of the sky.

The Team

"It started the summer after my junior year," Lewis recalls. "I had these two friends who were always disappearing for long weekends. Both had dropped out of MIT, and neither one seemed to be interested in getting a job. And yet they always seemed to have tons of money. Hundred-dollar bills, all over the apartment."

Andre Martinez and Steve Fisher (their names, like those of the other members of the MIT Blackjack Team, have been changed) were brilliant kids with a shared anarchistic streak: Martinez had mysteriously left MIT his senior year; Fisher had likewise quit with a semester to go before graduation. Lewis was surprised when they asked to meet him late at night in a classroom on the Infinite Corridor, the long hallway that runs down the center of the MIT campus. There, he was presented to a roomful of students he recognized from his math and science courses - the core of the MIT Blackjack Team. At the helm was a man in his mid-thirties with frighteningly bad teeth and equally poor hygiene, a former assistant professor who went by the name Micky Rosa.

[Jim]

I was in Atlantic City last week and lost a bit in the casinos. It's good to know some are beating the "odds."

... ...

[Max]

We should break his neck

==============================
"With every scientific advance, we grow closer to unlocking the mysteries of life and creation. But what have we gained if in the process, we lose our humanity. The most powerful thing we pass along to our children may not reside in the genes, but in the soul."
The Outer Limits(Criminal Nature)

[chasb]

While this story makes interesting reading, I have serious doubts about alot of it. First, trying to smuggle money through an airport, taped to your body. Sounds to me like they are spicing this story up to sell books. Who knows, they really may be STUPID. Second, I know a little about how the casino's operate (even with the whales- slang term for the large money players). Most large money blackjack games deal from a "shoe" (the dispenser that the dealer slides the cards out from). Generally there are over 2 decks in the shoe. This is insurance for the "house". It makes it virtually impossible to count cards. Obviously if you can find a table that is dealing from a single deck, it is to your advantage. This is where the pit boss comes in. ANY con you can think of to try and increase your odds of winning, the house has already seen and figured a way around it. Remember, those big shiny casinos were not built from losses. When a player starts winning, the "pit boss" (slang for a supervisor that watches over designated areas, including the dealers and players) gets on the phone to the "eye in the sky" (cameras that have zoom lenses above on the ceilings, located in those half domes) and calls out the table number. Then they zoom in and figure out what is going on. Sometimes, the casinos dispatch experts (in the art of catching people with whatever scam they have tried to pull off) to the floor surounding the action. When they catch you, and they always do, you get a visit to their back room. Where they generally beat the hell out of you. You agree to forfeit all the money, then they take your picture and post it in the camera room. Not many are stupid enough to come back after that type of experience, even those with brass balls. From my understanding of the game, the odds are 52-48 for the house. The only way to come out ahead is money management. Bet more while winning, less while losing. Increase your odds by "splitting, doubling down". The best rule is quit when your ahead. Blackjack is alot like life.

[vic]

They wrote the recipe for success, now we only need to find the funds for starting up and figure out a way to blend in with the rest of the people in the casino, so the security folks doesn't recognize us as a team :-)
And even if the should guess it, I feel pretty sure they would not hurt a disabled person, the worst thing I can imagine could happen was that they gave us a flat tire :-)
I would love to travel to USA for that ;-)