Hvordan en student gjeng slo casinoene

januar 15, 2018

When it comes to gambling, everyone knows the casino always comes out on top – right? But in the 1990s a group of students proved the punter didn’t have to be the loser. This is the story of the MIT Blackjack Team.

Bill Kaplan laughs, remembering his mother’s reaction when he told her he was postponing his entrance to Harvard to make his fortune at gambling. “Oh my God, this is ridiculous! What am I going to tell my friends?” she said.

Kaplan had read a book about card counting and believed he could use a mathematical model to make good money from blackjack. It was certainly not his mother’s dream for her straight-A student son.

But Kaplan’s stepfather was more open to the idea and threw down a challenge. “Play me every night and prove you can win,” he said.

“I crushed him for 2 weeks straight,” recalls Kaplan. “He told my mother ‘I can’t believe this but he can really win at this game – just let him go.’ So my mother wasn’t wild about it but I went to Vegas and I spent a year there.”

Bill Kaplan i Monte Carlo, 1982

That was in 1977 – Kaplan took $1,000 (£600) and within nine months had turned it into about $35,000 (£20,000). He went on to graduate from Harvard and over the years kept playing blackjack around the world.

His life took a dramatic turn when the leader of a small group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who had dabbled with card counting overheard him discussing his Vegas exploits.

They asked him to train and manage what would later become known as the infamous MIT Blackjack Team.

In 1992, with the gambling industry booming and new mega-casinos springing up, Kaplan and his partners saw an opportunity for them to go mega as well.

Friends and partners who had previously seen 100% returns on smaller investments, stumped up a startling $1 million to fund a new company, Strategic Investments, which would train bright students to card count and gamble – and then unleash them on the unsuspecting casinos.

One of these students was Mike Aponte, then a 22-year-old who was unsure what he wanted to do with his life. After perfecting the technique in empty classrooms, he was shocked to be handed $40,000 (£24,000) in cash to gamble on behalf of the team.

Strategic investment brevet

He was even more shocked to lose $10,000 (£6,000) of it in his very first ten minutes at a blackjack table in Atlantic City.

“An executive casino host came over right away and greeted me and took me up to a penthouse suite. It had a jacuzzi, pool table – it was amazing. I was in awe of the room but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I would normally have, because I was still upset about losing all that money.”

It was a lesson in just how volatile blackjack could be – even with a scientifically proven system. But he continued to rely on the team’s method that weekend and was, in the end, able to return to college with a net profit of about $25,000 (£15,000).

Casino hosts look after high rollers – clients who gamble big money – and reward them with perks of free food, drinks, tickets and rooms, whether or not they win. So the students, who spent the week going to class, eating in canteens and sharing dorm rooms, soon got used to being treated like VIPs.

But they also had to look the part – something that wasn’t easy for many. For Aponte, it was like going undercover. “You just have to pass that initial test where they size you up and think, ‘OK, is this someone we’re going to make a lot of money from?'”

He says that while skill at maths wasn’t a problem for anyone at MIT “what was important was being comfortable, being able to deal with the attention, because money just attracts attention.”

Mike Aponte poserer til venstre med en av hans største gevinster. Det er fortsatt noen av de andre spillerne som ønsker å være anonyme

As an Asian, Aponte says he had a big advantage. “We really played off that stereotype that Asians are big crazy gamblers. So my standard story was that I came from a rich family and I was the spoiled son.”

If the students soon got used to enjoying the perks of casino life, they also grew very relaxed about carrying around a lot of money. Sometimes too relaxed.

One night some members of the team came straight from a gambling trip in Las Vegas to join in a practice session in a MIT classroom. One put a brown paper lunch bag under his chair.

At 06:00 the next morning Kaplan received a phone call. “You won’t believe what I’ve done!” the student said. “You know I came back from Vegas and I had $125,000 (£74,000) in a paper bag? Well I left in the classroom. I totally forgot about it. I ran back and it’s not there.”

It turned out that a cleaner had put it in his locker. It took six months and investigations by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI before the team eventually got their money back.

Pressure was also growing as more players started being spotted by the casinos and were barred from playing. A private detective had been employed to find them and realised from the Boston addresses of many of those caught that this was a student team from MIT. He even obtained a yearbook including some of their photos.

Filmen 21 fra 2008 hvor Kevin Spacey spiller hovedrollen er inspirert fra MIT Blackjack historien

Many worried about being caught, even though Aponte says it was usually quite painless. “You’d get a tap on the back and the security man would say, ‘Mike, casino management has decided you’re welcome to play any game except blackjack.'”

But he says sometimes security guards could get aggressive and outside of the US it was even more risky.

He remembers the experience of one new team member who had just passed the tests to act as a big player. “Looking back it was a mistake as he didn’t have a good look for a big player. He wore glasses, he had a very meek personality, and he just looked really smart. He was really smart – he was a PHD student.”

Having just got married, the man thought it would be good to take his new wife, who was also in the team, to the Bahamas and try his luck at the casinos there.

“He was up about $20,000 or $30,000 (£12,000 or £18,000) and the casino figured out he was card counting and they brought the police in.

“They threw them in jail and confiscated not only all the money they’d won but the team money they’d brought with them. That player and his wife – they never played for the team again.”