| Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions |  | Author: Ben Mezrich
Publisher: Free Press
Category: eBooks
In Stock
Rating:  438 reviews
Sales Rank: 15,362
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.1720922
Publication Date: December 2, 2002
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Product Description
It's Friday night and you're on a red-eye to the city of sin. Strapped to your chest is half a million dollars; in your overnight bag is another twenty-five thousand in blackjack chips; and your wallet holds ten fake IDs. As soon as you land in Las Vegas, you are positive you are being investigated and followed. To top it all off, the IRS is auditing you, someone has been going through your mail -- and you have a multivariable calculus exam on Monday morning. Welcome to the world of an exclusive group of audacious MIT math geniuses who legally took the casinos for over three million dollars -- while still finding time for college keg parties, football games, and final exams. In the midst of the go-go eighties and nineties, a group of overachieving, anarchistic MIT students joined a decades-old underground blackjack club dedicated to counting cards and beating the system at major casinos around the world. While their classmates were working long hours in labs and libraries, the blackjack team traveled weekly to Las Vegas and other glamorous gambling locales, with hundreds of thousands of dollars duct-taped to their bodies. Underwritten by shady investors they would never meet, these kids bet fifty thousand dollars a hand, enjoyed VIP suites and other upscale treats, and partied with showgirls and celebrities. Handpicked by an eccentric mastermind -- a former MIT professor and an obsessive player who had developed a unique system of verbal cues, body signals, and role-playing -- this one ring of card savants earned more than three million dollars from corporate Vegas, making them the object of the casinos' wrath and eventually targets of revenge. Here is their inside story, revealing their secrets for the first time. Master storyteller Ben Mezrich takes you from the ivory towers of academia to the Technicolor world of Las Vegas, where anything can happen -- and often does. Bringing Down the House launches you into the seedy underworld of corporate Vegas -- deep into the realm of back rooms, ever-present video cameras, private investigators, and the threats and tactics of pit bosses and violent heavies. Equipped with twenty different aliases and disguises, the group of young card counters struggles around these roadblocks to live the high life -- until one fateful day when Vegas violently follows them home to Boston. Suddenly, there can be no more hiding behind false identities; the high life folds like a bad hand of cards. Filled with tense action and incredibly close calls, Bringing Down the House is a real-life mix of Liar's Poker and Ocean's Eleven -- and it's a story Vegas doesn't want you to read.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 438
Jawsome! May 27, 2010
Zoe Adams (Long Beach, Ca)
Entertaining story, well read audio book. Convenient format, and quick shipping. Couldn't be more pleased.
Unless this was an adaption of the early ninties cartoon called "Street Sharks." I really like the street sharks. That would have been 5 stars then.
 Intense, Intriguing, and Fun for Everyone April 23, 2010
James J. Murphy (Arlington Heights, IL)
20 out of 20 found this review helpful
After reading the book, Bringing Down the House, I was excited and intrigued with the world of card counting and the lives of the card counters. I plan to read more books about the subject. From the book, I got the feeling that Mezrich's goal throughout the book was to captivate and teach people about the world of casinos and card counting. He met one of the characters at a party and was fascinated enough to put the story into a book to enthrall everyone who reads it. I can guarantee to any readers of the book, that they will feel mesmerized by the casino life and more educated about the subject. This book will be a quick read that the reader will not be able to put down. It will interest a wide variety of people, from those who love to gamble and go to casinos all the time to those who have never stepped foot in one in their life. I know this from reading the reviews of the people before me. Many of them said that they gambled before, but a surprisingly large number of them said that they had never gambled in their lives.
In response to a few of the negative reviews, I read through many of them and have a few major disagreements to point out. First, J. Danielson, you talked about how you went to MIT and that Mezrich got a few of the details wrong about the school. To tell you the truth, when people read this book they won't remember the little details of graduating with honors or not, they'll remember the intense casino scenes. This brings me to the next topic of yours that I disagreed with. You talked about how you have been banned from a casino before and that they don't rough you up the way Mezrich made it seem like in his book. Well, there are more than a few casinos and what actions they take when kicking someone out will probably vary between them. Now, to Critical Reader, you say that you did research on Wikipedia after reading the book and found that some of the facts that Mezrich talked about were false. If you want to accuse someone of using false facts, you might want to try a reliable source next time. Finally, to the "crimsonwildcat," in your review, you accuse Mezrich of having what comes off as false conversations with the people in the book. If you haven't met any of these people, then I don't think you can really tell if it was false or not. However, I must agree with the negative reviews when you say that some parts of the book got repetitive. That was definitely a weakness, but Mezrich had many more high points, like expressing the tension between characters and showing the excitement of Las Vegas and a card counter's life.
A Narrative History of 21: fact mixed with fiction December 22, 2009
Brian Hawkinson (San Jose, CA)
I enjoy playing a little blackjack here and there, some poker at times, so I was interested to read 21, especially after I had watched the movie. I was extremely surprised to find that the book was so much more that the boiled down movie. Granted, I know books are always better than the movie it is based off of, but this seem to be in a complete different ball park. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the account of the MIT card counters in Las Vegas.
The book is interesting because you get a progressively more and more complex and threatened lifestyle as you move through time. This injects natural adrenaline and action into each new chapter. There was always the threat of violence in the background, even though counting is legal, so you continually read on as you anticipate the conflict as it brews. I was sad when I was done reading it and there was no more to read, but in the same light it had also come to a natural conclusion that felt right.
On the other side I was a little saddened as well by a simple Google search that showed that Mezrich admitted to slightly fictionalizing some of the story. This goes without saying in most nonfiction, though, as the narrative effect that makes it so readable, that I expected this was the case before I did a little research. Obviously a lot of the sidelines of the other characters, like Fisher and Martinez when they went out of country to gamble, where fiction, building a story around rumor (such as hearing that they had conflict and were banned, and that Fisher had a black eye; the guess is the narrative around this story that Mezrich used).
In the end I really didn't care. I know there was truth to a lot of the basic facts of the MIT team, and that there was fiction around some of the more fascinating aspects, but when it all came down to it it was an enjoyable read. Enough said for me. I would recommend to others despite learning that some of the story was fictionalized.
4 stars.
Loved the book! December 1, 2009
Rogue1
A great read. Also enjoyed the movie "21" after the book. It's the story of a group of M.I.T. students who count cards as a team in order to win money playing blackjack. I particularly enjoed watching Liza Lapira!
 Disappointed to learn it is mostly fiction October 3, 2009
Big G (Chicago, Ill)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I picked this up after seeing the movie '21.' I knew the movie was largely fiction, and wanted to see what really happened.
The book is a good read; the author can definitely write. However, I have learned that the book is at least 50% fiction! Look, anybody can make up a story. Just be up front about it. This book should not be in the non-fiction section. (Maybe it should be on the same shelf as that slimebag Fry's "A Million Little Pieces").
I'm thinking about writing about my gambling escapades. I think I have a pretty good imagination, too.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 438
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