In 1993 when Lewis was 20 years old and feeling aimless, he was invited to join the MIT Blackjack Team, organized by a former math instructor, who said, 'Blackjack is beatable.' Expanding on the 'hi-lo' card-counting techniques popularized by Edward Thorp in his 1962 book, Beat the Dealer, the MIT group's more advanced team strategies were. In reality, the MIT blackjack team was not founded by an MIT professor, nor was it the brainchild of one man as depicted in the film. Three former MIT students lead the blackjack team at various points in the team’s history. In fact, the MIT blackjack team wasn’t born at MIT at all. It was all started by a Harvard graduate. The MIT Blackjack Team Gets Busted The MIT Blackjack Team eventually brought itself down. Team members played it cool in the beginning but their wealth and success eventually went to their heads. I think it was only a matter of time since the team was comprised of players around the age of 20 or so.

• Mit Professor Blackjack Game
• Mit Professor Blackjack Games
• Mit Professor Blackjack
• Mit Professor Blackjack Online
• Mit Professor Blackjack Free

1. As a young man, Ed Thorp was a mathematician doing pretty much what you'd expect a mathematician to do: teaching, studying, trying to solve hard problems. There was one particular problem that.
2. The Professor of Blackjack Dr. Thorp is an American hedge fund manager who began his career as a professor of mathematics at MIT. In between those two endeavors he visited Las Vegas, played some blackjack, became enamored of the game’s continually changing house edge and wrote the most famous.

The hit Hollywood movie “21” was based on Ben Mezrich’s book, Bringing Down the House, which chronicled the resurgence of the MIT blackjack team in the 1990’s. The book follows the real characters and true story in only parts. Much of it is fiction. The movie, well, that’s all Hollywood schlock. The founder wasn’t an MIT professor, there wasn’t a love-story with the main characters, they didn’t play blackjack to get cash to go to medical school, and they weren’t all father-less, broke students. Well, students usually are broke, so that part’s mostly true.

The 1980’s

About the time Ken Uston was winding down his blackjack play and concentrating on land deals, books, and lawsuits against Atlantic City, Reno and Las Vegas casinos, Bill Kaplan formed a team of blackjack players to do some card counting on the east coast. He says his first recruits were JP Massar, who co-managed the team, and John Chang. Kaplan was a Harvard Business School graduate. Chang graduated from MIT in 1985. Other early recruits were MIT students also.

Kaplan was hardly a novice. He made treks to Atlantic City casinos and had been the manager of a team of card counters based in Las Vegas in the late 1970’s. The movie certainly forgot that part. As for the true story, the team name is accurate because a group of six MIT students who lived in the Burton-Conner House at MIT read Lawrence Revere, Ken Uston and Ed Thorp’s books on blackjack and practiced playing the game.

While several of them graduated in May, they offered a course in blackjack for MIT’s January Independent Activities Period, a short monthly course. A few of the students were approached by a professional gambler and an investor with $5,000 to put-up as a bankroll. Eventually four of the students played as a team in Atlantic City, each making about $3,500. Later, one of the players, JP Massar, overheard Kaplan talking about blackjack in a Chinese restaurant one evening, introduced himself, and invited Kaplan to watch his buddies winning in Atlantic City.

Kaplan was intrigued, as they did play well, but they were disjointed, used different count systems, and made errors that drove what should have been a hefty 2% edge down to under 1%. There were too many math computations, too many basic strategy exceptions, and too much drama.

Kaplan offered to work with the friends if they were willing to follow more stringent rules including a single Advanced Count and a more rigid wagering system. They weren’t too happy about the idea, but eventually met on several occasions and worked on the new count.

The First Real MIT Team

Kaplan was serious about using a business approach to the new team. He wrote a prospectus, projected a $170 per hour win rate, and took investments from team members (who eventually totaled 10) and from outside the group. With an $89,000 bank they started playing in Atlantic City. Both Kaplan and Massar served as Big Players, placing large wagers while their teammates counted down shoe after shoe at various tables.

The counters played $5 or $10 per hand. The Big Players joined games when the count was positive for the players and wagered $500 to $1000. The Pit Bosses weren’t completely fooled, but with dozens of tables and big money being played everywhere, the MIT Team was able to blend-in fairly well and get in plenty of play. They were rarely shuffled-up on.

Still, it was grueling for the teammates. They worked hard, made mistakes, practiced till all hours of the morning, and went back for more when they could find the time. It took nearly 10-weeks to double the first playing bank, but once the double was done, everyone was happy. The team of mostly undergraduate students were paid $80 per hour for their play. The overall hourly rate for play was over $160, with the other $80 going to investors.

New Recruits

The real advantage that the MIT Team had in both the 1980’s and the 1990’s was that they had an unlimited supply of potential card counters. Harvard and MIT were obviously filled with motived, bright students, and the team actually recruited new members with flyers placed in quads and dorms. The training wasn’t easy on new recruits. Those who professed knowledge of counting were put through an intense series of sessions consisting of counting down six-deck shoes over and over. They were expected to make less than a single mistake per shoe while keeping the count correct.

Then, each member was taught the same advanced count system, grilled on the basic strategy exceptions that should be made at times based on the count, and taken to Atlantic City for live casino play, completely supervised by trainers. If they passed, they were allowed to work with the team and either count at team tables or move up to money handlers and Big Players. As the team grew to more than 30 players by 1984 it became more important for the occasional trip to Las Vegas.

Clubs in Reno and Lake Tahoe had lower table limits and there was more heat due to the smaller percentage of big money players at the casinos. Only the MGM offered enough tables for a team of 10 or 12 players to blend in, but it wasn’t worth the trip for one casino with Vegas-style limits and games (all six-deck shoes).

By this time Kaplan was well known in both the New Jersey and Las Vegas casinos. He settled into a reduced role and played sporadically for the team, now being managed by Massar, Chang and Bill Rubin. The managers had an easy time of it, as investors couldn’t wait to get their money into action, but it wasn’t necessary. The team doubled several banks each year, held back some of the money to increase their worth, and played to $200,000 banks on a regular basis.

While breaking the banks (doubling) was fun, the work of constantly counting cards perfectly, giving signals, keeping an eye on the bosses, and traveling between the east and west coasts wasn’t quite as fun as it might sound. The play was stressful. One year the team only doubled a single bank, barely making a profit, but like the Uston teams, most banks were successful.

New Casinos – New Money

As casino gambling grew in the US, new outlets were available for plunder. The main drawbacks were slow dealers (who were all newly trained) and low limits, but when the mammoth Foxwoods Casino opened in Connecticut with hundreds of blackjack tables it was easy pickings. And, the money was good enough to convince an author to write about the team, and Hollywood to someday make a movie. As for the team, it was nearly invincible.

Kaplan joined Massar and Chang again in 1992 and they formed a company called Strategic Investments to bankroll a super team. The partnership easily raised their million dollar goal and went to work using a slightly different system, employing a counter and a controller on each game. The controller played small stakes, just like the counter, but was there as a final check to make sure the count was accurate and to watch the bosses. When the count soared into positive territory the Big Player was signaled and given the count, often with codes (such as “my ice tea is too sweet,” which translated to sweet sixteen, or a count of +16). Sometimes the team had three Big Players in action watching many tables. The team eventually had more than 80 players, hitting new casinos all over the country from Mississippi, to Iowa, Chicago and of course, Las Vegas. The Bahamas was also a favorite location.

They pushed hard, got barred, and trained new Big Players. They cleared more than $3 million dollars before the barring’s became commonplace. As more and more players were carded, photographed, and banned from play, a common denominator was noted: many of the players were from Massachusetts, some from or near Cambridge.

Individual casinos who employed the Griffin Detective Agency came to the same conclusion that some of the players might be college students from MIT. That conclusion may have been helped through the sale of team member names, copies of MIT yearbooks, or both. Either way, Strategic Investments had a banner year in 1993 and dissolved the partnership on December 31, 1993, but that wasn’t the end of the teams.

The Movie Teams

Mit Professor Blackjack Game

When Strategic Investments went by the wayside, several players who had enjoyed making up to $50,000 a year at blackjack came up with their own teams. Two large groups were first called the Amphibians and the Reptiles. Each was loaded with talent, each was well bankrolled ($500,000 to $1,000,000 banks), and each had several dozen intertwined players in various locations across the country.

The Amphibians included players like Katie Lilienkamp, Semyon Dukach and Andy Bloch. Bloch was an MIT student, earned a law degree, and then turned to poker to earn a living. He says his largest individual win at blackjack was $100,000.

The Reptiles were led by Mike Aponte, Manlio Lopez and Wes Atamian. Aponte convinced Jeff Ma (who inspired the lead character Ben Campbell in “21”) to play on his team of card counters. Ben Mezrich, author of Bringing Down the House (which became the movie “21”) based his story on a team that was created after the Amphibian team won more than $4 million.

Was the smaller team really successful enough to tell a story about? According to Mike Aponte, he once won $200,000 on a single trip and the team won $500,000 over the Super Bowl 1995 weekend. That’s pretty strong. Did they have more money than they knew what to do with?

According to Blackjack Forum Online, John Chang and his wife cleaned his apartment before he moved and they found more than $165,000 in chips, cash and travelers checks he had forgotten he had, stashed all over the apartment. That’s pretty strong too.

Edward Oakley Thorp (born August 14, 1932) is an American mathematics professor, author, hedge fund manager, and blackjack researcher. He pioneered the modern applications of probability theory, including the harnessing of very small correlations for reliable financial gain.

Thorp is the author of Beat the Dealer, which mathematically proved that the house advantage in blackjack could be overcome by card counting.^[1] He also developed and applied effective hedge fund techniques in the financial markets, and collaborated with Claude Shannon in creating the first wearable computer.^[2]

Thorp received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1958, and worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1959 to 1961. He was a professor of mathematics from 1961 to 1965 at New Mexico State University, and then joined the University of California, Irvine where he was a professor of mathematics from 1965 to 1977 and a professor of mathematics and finance from 1977 to 1982.^[3]

Computer-aided research in blackjack[edit]

Thorp used the IBM 704 as a research tool in order to investigate the probabilities of winning while developing his blackjack game theory, which was based on the Kelly criterion, which he learned about from the 1956 paper by Kelly.^[4][5][6][7] He learned Fortran in order to program the equations needed for his theoretical research model on the probabilities of winning at blackjack. Thorp analyzed the game of blackjack to a great extent this way, while devising card-counting schemes with the aid of the IBM 704 in order to improve his odds,^[8] especially near the end of a card deck that is not being reshuffled after every deal.

Applied research in Reno, Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas[edit]

Thorp decided to test his theory in practice in Reno, Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas.^[6][8][9]Thorp started his applied research using $10,000, with Manny Kimmel, a wealthy professional gambler and former bookmaker,^[10] providing the venture capital. First they visited Reno and Lake Tahoe establishments where they tested Thorp's theory at the local blackjack tables.^[9] The experimental results proved successful and his theory was verified since he won $11,000 in a single weekend.^[6] Casinos now shuffle well before the end of the deck as a countermeasure to his methods. During his Las Vegas casino visits Thorp frequently used disguises such as wraparound glasses and false beards.^[9] In addition to the blackjack activities, Thorp had assembled a baccarat team which was also winning.^[9]

News quickly spread throughout the gambling community, which was eager for new methods of winning, while Thorp became an instant celebrity among blackjack aficionados. Due to the great demand generated about disseminating his research results to a wider gambling audience, he wrote the book Beat the Dealer in 1966, widely considered the original card counting manual,^[11]which sold over 700,000 copies, a huge number for a specialty title which earned it a place in the New York Times bestseller list, much to the chagrin of Kimmel whose identity was thinly disguised in the book as Mr. X.^[6]

Thorp's blackjack research^[12] is one of the very few examples where results from such research reached the public directly, completely bypassing the usual academic peer review process cycle. He has also stated that he considered the whole experiment an academic exercise.^[6]

In addition, Thorp, while a professor of mathematics at MIT, met Claude Shannon, and took him and his wife Betty Shannon as partners on weekend forays to Las Vegas to play roulette and blackjack, at which Thorp was very successful.^[13]His team's roulette play was the first instance of using a wearable computer in a casino — something which is now illegal, as of May 30, 1985, when the Nevada devices law came into effect as an emergency measure targeting blackjack and roulette devices.^[2][13] The wearable computer was co-developed with Claude Shannon between 1960–61. Thefinal operating version of the device was tested in Shannon's home lab at his basement in June 1961.^[2] His achievements have led him to become an inaugural member of the Blackjack Hall of Fame.^[14]

Mit Professor Blackjack Games

Mit Professor Blackjack

He also devised the 'Thorp count', a method for calculating the likelihood of winning in certain endgame positions in backgammon.^[15]

Stock market[edit]

Since the late 1960s, Thorp has used his knowledge of probability and statistics in the stock market by discovering and exploiting a number of pricing anomalies in the securities markets, and he has made a significant fortune.^[5] Thorp's first hedge fund was Princeton/Newport Partners. He is currently the President of Edward O. Thorp & Associates, based in Newport Beach, California. In May 1998, Thorp reported that his personal investments yielded an annualized 20 percent rate of return averaged over 28.5 years.^[16]

Bibliography[edit]

• (Autobiography) Edward O. Thorp, A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market, 2017. [1]
• Edward O. Thorp, Elementary Probability, 1977, ISBN0-88275-389-4
• Edward Thorp, Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One, ISBN0-394-70310-3
• Edward O. Thorp, Sheen T. Kassouf, Beat the Market: A Scientific Stock Market System, 1967, ISBN0-394-42439-5 (online pdf, retrieved 22 Nov 2017)
• Edward O. Thorp, The Mathematics of Gambling, 1984, ISBN0-89746-019-7 (online version part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)
• Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone
• The Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion: Theory and Practice (World Scientific Handbook in Financial Economic Series), ISBN978-9814293495, February 10, 2011 by Leonard C. MacLean (Editor), Edward O. Thorp (Editor), William T. Ziemba (Editor)

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^Peter A. Griffin (1979) The Theory of Blackjack, Huntington Press, ISBN978-0929712130
2. ^ ^abcEdward O. Thorp. 'The Invention of the First Wearable Computer'(PDF). Edward O. Thorp & Associates. Retrieved April 26, 2010.
3. ^'Founding professor of math donates personal, professional papers to UCI Libraries'. UCI News. UC Irvine. June 12, 2018.
4. ^Understanding Fortune’s Formula by Edward O. Thorp Copyright 2007 Quote: 'My 1962 book Beat the Dealer explained the detailed theory and practice. The “optimal” way to bet in favorable situations was an important feature.In Beat the Dealer I called this, naturally enough, “The Kelly gambling system,” since I learned about it from the 1956 paper by John L. Kelly.'
5. ^ ^abTHE KELLY CRITERION IN BLACKJACK, SPORTS BETTING, AND THE STOCK MARKET by Edward O. Thorp Paper presented at: The 10th International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking Montreal, June 1997
6. ^ ^abcdeDiscovery channel documentary series: Breaking Vegas, Episode: 'Professor Blackjack' with interviews by Ed and Vivian Thorp
7. ^The Tech (MIT) 'Thorpe, 704 Beat Blackjack' Vol. 81 No. I Cambridge, Mass., Friday, February 10, 1961
8. ^ ^ab'American Scientist online: Bettor Math, article and book review by Elwyn Berlekamp'. Archived from the original on April 23, 2007. Retrieved March 18, 2006.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)
9. ^ ^abcdIt's Bye! Bye! Blackjack Edward Thorp, the pensive professor above, is shaking the gambling world with a system for beating a great card game. He published it a year ago, and now the proof is in: it works David E. Scherman January 13, 1964 pp. 1–3 from SI Vault (beta)(CNN) Quotes: 'The unlikely trio was soon on its way to Reno and Lake Tahoe, where Thorp's horn-rimmed glasses, dark hair and fresh, scrubbed face hardly struck terror into the pit bosses. (p. 1)', 'But Edward Thorp and his computer are not done with Nevada yet. The classiest gambling game of all—just ask James Bond—is that enticing thing called baccarat, or chemin de fer. Its rules prevent a fast shuffle, and there is very little opportunity for hanky-panky. Thorp has now come up with a system to beat it, and the system seems to work. He has a baccarat team, and it is over $5,000 ahead. It has also been spotted and barred from play in two casinos. Could it be bye-bye to baccarat, too? (p. 1)' and 'But disguises frequently work. Thorp himself now uses a combination of wraparound glasses and a beard to change his appearance on successive Las Vegas visits. (p. 3)'
10. ^Breaking Vegas “Professor Blackjack.”Archived December 21, 2008, at the Wayback Machine Biography channel Rated: TVPG Running Time: 60 Minutes Quote: 'In 1961, lifelong gambler Manny Kimmel, a 'connected' New York businessman, read an article by MIT math professor Ed Thorp claiming that anyone could make a fortune at blackjack by using math theory to count cards. The mob-connected sharpie offered the young professor a deal: he would put up the money, if Thorp would put his theory to action and card-count their way to millions. From Thorp's initial research to the partnership's explosive effect on the blackjack landscape, this episode boasts fascinating facts about the game's history, colorful interviews (including with Thorp), and archival footage that evokes the timeless allure and excitement of the thriving casinos in the early `60s. '
11. ^'Blackjack Hero profile'. Blackjackhero.com. Retrieved April 26, 2010.
12. ^A favorable strategy for twenty-one. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 47 (1961), 110-112
13. ^ ^ab'Poundstone, William: Fortune's Formula : The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street'. Retrieved April 26, 2010.
14. ^Anthony Curtis. 'Las Vegas Advisor on Ed Thorp'. Lasvegasadvisor.com. Retrieved April 26, 2010.
15. ^Chuck Bower (January 23, 1997). 'Cube Handling in Races: Thorpe count'. bkgm.com. Backgammon Galore. Retrieved May 8, 2013.
16. ^'Thorp's market activities'. Webhome.idirect.com. Archived from the original on October 31, 2005. Retrieved April 26, 2010.

Sources[edit]

Mit Professor Blackjack Online

• Patterson, Scott D., The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It, Crown Business, 352 pages, 2010. ISBN0-307-45337-5 via Patterson and Thorp interview on Fresh Air, February 1, 2010, including excerpt 'Chapter 2: The Godfather: Ed Thorp'

External links[edit]

Mit Professor Blackjack Free

• Edward O. Thorp at the Mathematics Genealogy Project