You can include up to 250 people in a group chat. Add people to the conversation. To loop more people into the conversation, just click Add people (or View and add participants in group chat) in the top right corner of Teams. Then, type the names of the people you'd like to chat with, select how much of the chat history to include, and click Add. The Amphibians were primarily led by Semyon Dukach, with Dukach as the big player, Katie Lilienkamp (a controller), and Andy Bloch (a spotter). The other team was the Reptiles, led by Mike Aponte, Manlio Lopez and Wes Atamian. These teams had various legal.

Card counting is the most talked-about blackjack advantage play method, but it’s usually thought of as being done by a single person. A single card counter can do fairly well in blackjack, but a well-run blackjack team can be much more profitable.

Books and movies have been released about famous blackjack teams, like the MIT blackjack team. If you’re interested in putting together a blackjack team to battle the casinos, I’ve covered some pointers below.

Types of Blackjack Teams

A blackjack team consists of two or more people, and a team can be run different ways.

The same concept can work with three or more team members.

Another type of blackjack team has a number of counters who sit in games and count cards but don’t vary the size of their bets. When the count is favorable, they signal another team member, who enters the game and makes big bets while the count remains in their favor.

This type of team can have as few as two counters and one big player or a large number of counters and one or two big players. Depending on the talents of the players on the team, the same member can work as a counter on one trip and as a big player on a different trip to a different location. This isn’t normal, but it’s possible.

Both types of teams can win money in the long run, but if a team is run correctly, a larger team using a big player can be more profitable, and it’s more difficult for the casino to identify the team.

Team Management

A blackjack team that’s bigger than two people needs a clear leader or manager. The manager doesn’t have to play, but he or she can play as part of the team. The manager needs to be smart, and it needs to be clear that he or she is in control at all times.

This page is designed with the team manager in mind, but the information can be useful to anyone involved with a blackjack team.

The team manager controls the bankroll, plans how the team runs, organizes trips, and makes sure the team members don’t make mistakes that lead to the downfall of the team. The manager also has to have a firm understanding of variance because even the best blackjack teams lose sometimes. A string of losses can destroy a team if it doesn’t have a strong manager.

Bankroll

For a blackjack team to make enough money to pay everyone enough to make it worth their while, you need to have a large bankroll. You also need a large bankroll so that the team can ride out short-term negative variance and survive until they start making a profit.

You can set up the way team members are paid in different ways.

Two Person Blackjack Team Movie

The simplest way is for each team member to receive an equal share, but many times, the counters are paid a straight hourly wage.

Things can get complicated when the bankroll comes from an outside source that must be repaid and gets a percentage on their investment.

In a perfect world, you provide the entire bankroll and build and run the team. But this is challenging or impossible for most players. They simply don’t have enough money.

This page isn’t about how to fund the team bankroll, but understand that you’re going to have to get the money somewhere.

This means that you’re probably going to have to convince someone that you can safely offer a good return on investment.

Trust

The two most important things you need for a blackjack team to be successful are talent and trust. All of the team members need to be talented enough to make money for the team, but trust is just as important.

This is why building and running blackjack teams is so difficult. Beyond the fact that team members have to be trusted with cash, a team can start coming apart during a downswing.

Beating the casinos using card counting isn’t something that happens in a straight line. Some sessions are losses or break even, and some sessions are profitable. If the team has more than one big player, one of them can have a great session while the other doesn’t.

While you hope to recruit talented counters, sometimes they make mistakes. Any time the team faces a downswing, it can build resentment and distrust. Accusations can be made, and feelings can get hurt.

This might not seem like a big deal, but anything that can cause discord inside the team must be eliminated as quickly as possible.

The Basics

You have to have one or more people who can count cards well. It helps if the person you use for the big bets can also count, but it’s not a 100% requirement. I don’t believe there’s a perfect team size, but a team with three counters and one big player is a good way to start.

It’s not overly difficult to learn how to count cards. With enough practice, almost anyone can learn how to do it. Because counters on a team always make the minimum table bet and just use basic blackjack strategy, they usually are safe from heat from the casino. This reduces the pressure on them.

Of course, you want to make sure your counters are good enough that they rarely make a mistake, but you can teach most people how to be good enough. For this reason, I recommend finding a few people you can trust and training them as counters for your first team.

You can use friends or family members, but you want to make sure that family members don’t look alike. It’s important that the casino never sees the team together and that it’s as hard as possible to identify team members.

Find two or three friends or family members and start working on your skills. You can act as the big player to start. Once you learn the ins and outs of making your team a success, you can start expanding or building another team.

While it’s good to be close to the team, you can run more than one team in different areas if you have good management skills and have people you can trust.

At times, some of the MIT blackjack teams had dozens of members working all over the United States and elsewhere. You can do the same thing if you’re smart and can put together a large enough bankroll.

Challenges of Running a Blackjack Team

Blackjack teams face a number of challenges in addition to the ones I’ve already covered.

What are you going to do if you get caught with tens of thousands in cash and are questioned by the authorities?

Carrying around a large amount of cash isn’t illegal, but law enforcement often thinks you must be into something illegal if they catch you. The simplest way to explain all of the cash is to file taxes as a professional gambler and keep the records with you. This doesn’t guarantee that you won’t have trouble, but it can help.

You might be thinking that you can avoid all of this by simply wiring the money to the casino, but this is a big mistake.

Members of your team need to stay in different places and never spend any time together away from the blackjack pit. They can’t act like they know each other even in the pit. They need to start playing at different times also.

If you do things well, the big player can earn comps, including free hotel rooms, but even this can be dangerous. Eventually, the casinos figure out that they’re being attacked and start looking closely at everything.

The good news is that there are more casinos available than in the past, so you can move around a great deal. You can also rotate players as your team grows to make it more difficult to identify possible team members.

If you run successful teams for a long period of time, you’re going to get burnt by the casinos eventually. Most of the successful people behind the best teams are forced to work behind the scenes. This stresses your management ability, but you can make it work.

Conclusion

A blackjack team can be profitable, and it’s not as hard to put one together as many people believe. The truth is that a proper bankroll is about the only thing needed that you can’t learn.

Start small by creating a blackjack team with people you trust, and you have a good chance to succeed.

The MIT Blackjack Team was a group of students and ex-students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and other leading colleges who used card counting techniques and more sophisticated strategies to beat casinos at blackjack worldwide. The team and its successors operated successfully from 1979 through the beginning of the 21st century. Many other blackjack teams have been formed around the world with the goal of beating the casinos.

Blackjack and card counting[edit]

Blackjack can be legally beaten by a skilled player. Beyond the basic strategy of when to hit and when to stand, individual players can use card counting, shuffle tracking, or hole carding to improve their odds. Since the early 1960s, a large number of card counting schemes have been published, and casinos have adjusted the rules of play in an attempt to counter the most popular methods. The idea behind all card counting is that, because a low card is usually bad and a high card usually good, and as cards already seen since the last shuffle cannot be at the top of the deck and thus drawn, the counter can determine the high and low cards that have already been played. They thus know the probability of getting a high card (10,J,Q,K,A) as compared to a low card (2,3,4,5,6).

In 1979, six MIT students and residents of the Burton-Conner House at MIT taught themselves card-counting. They traveled to Atlantic City during the spring break to win their fortune. The group went their separate ways when most of them graduated in May of that year. Most never gambled again, but some of them maintained an avid interest in card counting and remained in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two of them, J.P. Massar and Jonathan, offered a course on blackjack for MIT's January, 1980 Independent Activities Period (IAP), during which classes may be offered on almost any subject.

First MIT blackjack 'bank'[edit]

In late November 1979, Dave, a professional blackjack player contacted one of the card-counting students, J.P. Massar, after seeing a notice for the blackjack course. He proposed forming a new group to go to Atlantic City to take advantage of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission's recent ruling that made it illegal for the Atlantic City casinos to ban card counters. Casinos instead have to take other countermeasures like shuffling the cards earlier than normal, using more decks of cards, or offering games with worse rules to destroy the advantage gained by counting—even though these all negatively impact the non-counter as well.^[1]

The group of four players, a professional gambler, and an investor who put up most of their capital ($5,000), went to Atlantic City in late December. They recruited more MIT students as players at the January blackjack class. They played intermittently through May 1980 and increased their capital four-fold, but were nonetheless more like a loose group sharing capital than a team with consistent strategies and quality control.

'Mr. M' meets Bill Kaplan[edit]

In May 1980, J. P. Massar, known as 'Mr. M' in the History Channel documentary, overheard a conversation about professional blackjack at a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge. He introduced himself to the speaker, Bill Kaplan, a 1980 Harvard MBA graduate who had run a successful blackjack team in Las Vegas three years earlier. Kaplan had earned his BA at Harvard in 1977 and delayed his admission to Harvard Business School for a year, when he moved to Las Vegas and formed a team of blackjack players using his own research and statistical analysis of the game. Using funds he received on graduation as Harvard's outstanding scholar-athlete, Kaplan generated more than a 35 fold rate of return in fewer than nine months of play.^[2]

Kaplan continued to run his Las Vegas blackjack team as a sideline while attending Harvard Business School but, by the time of his graduation in May 1980, the players were so 'burnt out' in Nevada they were forced to hit the international circuit. Not feeling he could continue to manage the team successfully while they traveled throughout Europe and elsewhere, encountering different rules, playing conditions, and casino practices, Kaplan parted ways with his teammates, who then splintered into multiple small playing teams in pursuit of more favorable conditions throughout the world.

Kaplan observes Massar and friends in action[edit]

After meeting Kaplan and hearing about his blackjack successes, Massar asked Kaplan if he was interested in going with a few of Massar's blackjack-playing friends to Atlantic City to observe their play. Given the fortuitous timing (Kaplan's parting with his Las Vegas team), he agreed to go in the hopes of putting together a new local team that he could train and manage.

Kaplan observed Massar and his teammates playing for a weekend in Atlantic City. He noted that each of the players used a different, and overcomplicated, card counting strategy. This resulted in error rates that undermined the benefits of the more complicated strategies. Upon returning to Cambridge, Kaplan detailed the problems he observed to Massar.

Kaplan capitalizes a new team[edit]

Kaplan said he would back a team but it had to be run as a business with formal management procedures, a required counting and betting system, strict training and player approval processes, and careful tracking of all casino play. A couple of the players were initially averse to the idea. They had no interest in having to learn a new playing system, being put through 'trial by fire' checkout procedures before being approved to play, being supervised in the casinos, or having to fill out detailed player sheets (such as casino, cash in and cash out totals, time period, betting strategy and limits, and the rest) for every playing session. However, their keen interest in the game coupled with Kaplan's successful track record won out.

The newly capitalised 'bank' of the MIT Blackjack Team started on 1 August 1980. The investment stake was $89,000, with both outside investors and players putting up the capital. Ten players, including Kaplan, Massar, Jonathan, Goose, and 'Big Dave' (aka 'coach', to distinguish from the Dave in the first round) played on this bank. Ten weeks later they more than doubled the original stake. Profits per hour played at the tables were $162.50, statistically equivalent to the projected rate of $170/hour detailed in the investor offering prospectus. Per the terms of the investment offering, players and investors split the profits with players paid in proportion to their playing hours and computer simulated win rates. Over the ten-week period of this first bank, players, mostly undergraduates, earned an average of over $80/hour while investors achieved an annualized return in excess of 250%.

Strategy and techniques[edit]

The team often recruited students through flyers and the players' friends from college campuses across the country. The team tested potential members to find out if they were suitable candidates and, if they were, the team thoroughly trained the new members for free. Fully trained players had to pass an intense 'trial by fire,' consisting of playing through 8 six-deck shoes with almost perfect play, and then undergo further training, supervision, and similar check-outs in actual casino play until they could become full stakes players.

The group combined individual play with a team approach of counters and big players to maximize opportunities and disguise the betting patterns that card counting produces. In a 2002 interview in Blackjack Forum magazine,^[3] John Chang, an MIT undergrad who joined the team in late 1980 (and became MIT team co-manager in the mid-1980s and 1990s), reported that, in addition to classic card counting and blackjack team techniques, at various times the group used advanced shuffle and ace tracking techniques. While the MIT team's card counting techniques can give players an overall edge of about 2 percent, some of the MIT team's methods have been established as gaining players an overall edge of about 4 percent.^{[citation needed]} In his interview, Chang reported that the MIT team had difficulty attaining such edges in actual play, and their overall results had been best with straight card counting.

The MIT Team's approach was originally developed by Al Francesco, elected by professional gamblers as one of the original seven inductees into the Blackjack Hall of Fame. Blackjack team play was first written about by Ken Uston, an early member of Al Francesco's teams. Uston's book on blackjack team play, Million Dollar Blackjack, was published shortly before the founding of the first MIT team. Kaplan enhanced Francesco's team methods and used them for the MIT team. The team concept enabled players and investors to leverage both their time and money, reducing their 'risk of ruin' while also making it more difficult for casinos to detect card counting at their tables.

Team history 1980–1990[edit]

The MIT Blackjack Team continued to play throughout the 1980s, growing to as many as 35 players in 1984 with a capitalization of as much as $350,000. Having played and run successful teams since 1977, Kaplan reached a point in late 1984 where he could not show his face in any casino without being followed by the casino personnel in search of his team members. As a consequence he decided to fall back on his growing real estate investment and development company, his 'day job' since 1980, and stopped managing the team. He continued for another year or so as an occasional player and investor in the team, now being run by Massar, Chang and Bill Rubin, a player who joined the team in 1984.

The MIT Blackjack Team ran at least 22 partnerships in the time period from late 1979 through 1989. At least 70 people played on the team in some capacity (either as counters, Big Players, or in various supporting roles) over that time span. Every partnership was profitable during this time period, after paying all expenses as well as the players' and managers' share of the winnings, with returns to investors ranging from 4%/year to over 300%/year.

Strategic Investments 1992–1993[edit]

In 1992, Bill Kaplan, J.P. Massar, and John Chang decided to capitalize on the opening of Foxwoods Casino in nearby Connecticut, where they planned to train new players. Acting as the General Partner, they formed a Massachusetts Limited Partnership in June 1992 called Strategic Investments to bankroll the new team. Structured similar to the numerous real estate development limited partnerships that Kaplan had formed, the limited partnership raised a million dollars, significantly more money than any of their previous teams, with a method based on Edward Thorp's high low system. It involved three players: a big player, a controller, and a spotter. The spotter checked when the deck went positive with card counting, the controller would bet small constantly, wasting money, and verifying the spotter's count. Once the controller found a positive, he would signal to the big player. He would make a massive bet, and win big. Confident with this new funding, the three general partners ramped up their recruitment and training efforts to capitalize on the opportunity.

Over the next two years, the MIT Team grew to nearly 80 players, including groups and players in Cambridge, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, and Washington. Sarah McCord, who joined the team in 1983 as an MIT student and later moved to California, was added as a partner soon after SI was formed and became responsible for training and recruitment of West Coast players.

At various times, there were nearly 30 players playing simultaneously at different casinos around the world, including Native American casinos throughout the country, Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Canada, and island locations. Never before had casinos throughout the world seen such an organized and scientific onslaught directed at the game. While the profits rolled in, so did the 'heat' from the casinos, and many MIT Team members were identified and barred. These members were replaced by fresh players from MIT, Harvard, and other colleges and companies, and play continued. Eventually, investigators hired by casinos realized that many of those they had banned had addresses in or near Cambridge, and the connection to MIT and a formalized team became clear. The detectives obtained copies of recent MIT yearbooks and added photographs from it to their image database.

With its leading players banned from most casinos and other more lucrative investment opportunities opening up at the end of the recession, Strategic Investments paid out its substantial earnings to players and investors and dissolved its partnership on December 31, 1993.

1994 and forward[edit]

After the dissolution of Strategic Investments, a few of the players took their winnings and split off into two independent groups. The Amphibians were primarily led by Semyon Dukach, with Dukach as the big player, Katie Lilienkamp (a controller), and Andy Bloch (a spotter). The other team was the Reptiles, led by Mike Aponte, Manlio Lopez and Wes Atamian. These teams had various legal structures, and at times million dollar banks and 50+ players. By 2000 the 15+ year reign of the MIT Blackjack Teams came to an end as players drifted into other pursuits.

In 1999, a member of the Amphibians won at Max Rubin's 3rd Annual Blackjack Ball competition. The event was featured in an October 1999 Cigar Aficionado article, which said the winner earned the unofficial title 'Most Feared Man in the Casino Business'.^[4]

In the media[edit]

Books[edit]

Two Person Blackjack Team Win

• A variety of stories about a few of the players from the MIT Blackjack Team formed the basis of The New York Times best-sellingBringing Down the House, written by Ben Mezrich. While originally marketed as nonfiction, Mezrich later admitted characters and stories in the book were mostly fictive and composites of players and stories he had heard about through hearsay. The private investigation firm referred to as Plymouth in Bringing Down the House was Griffin Investigations.^[5]
• Mezrich wrote a follow-up book, Busting Vegas, which took even greater liberty with the actual happenings of the team. Many events in this book were at least partly based on incidents that occurred during the team's Strategic Investments era.^[6]
• Jeffrey Ma wrote a book titled The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big in Business about his time on the 1994 MIT blackjack team.
• Nathaniel Tilton, a student of former MIT team captains Mike Aponte and Semyon Dukach, authored The Blackjack Life detailing his experiences playing and being trained by the MIT Blackjack Team players.^[7]

Films[edit]

• The 2004 film The Last Casino is loosely based on this premise and features three students and a professor counting cards in Ontario and Quebec.^[8]
• The 2008 film 21, inspired by Bringing Down the House and produced by and starring Kevin Spacey and Jim Sturgess, was released on March 28, 2008 by Columbia Pictures. Jeff Ma and Henry Houh, former players on the team, appear in the movie as casino dealers, and Bill Kaplan appears in a cameo in the background of the underground Chinese gambling parlor scene. The script took significant artistic license with events, with most of its plot being invented for the movie, hence it refers to being 'inspired by true events' rather than 'based on true events.' One of the most significant departures from reality was the portrayal of the team being run by a professor (the Kevin Spacey character), when in reality the team was always run by students and alumni. The characters in the movie were also fictionalized amalgams of various players throughout the years of the team's existence - for example, the character Choi is very loosely (and inaccurately) based on Johnny Chang, and the character Ben Campbell, is an amalgam of numerous players, with the opening scene based on Big Dave's interview, and subsequent admission to Harvard Medical School, where much of the interview revolved around his participation on the team.
• The 2010 film Teen Patti is an uncredited remake of 21.

Television[edit]

• The Mysteries at the Museum series on the Travel Channel featured the story of the MIT Blackjack Team in the episode titled 'Siamese Twins, Assassin Umbrella, Capone's Cell'.
• The story of the MIT Blackjack Team, in its incarnation as Strategic Investments, was told in The History Channel documentary, Breaking Vegas, directed by Bruce David Klein.
• The Bringing Down The House period was featured on episodes of the Game Show Network documentary series, Anything to Win, and HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel (episode 116).
• The BBC documentary, Making Millions the Easy Way, addressed the Bringing Down the House period as part of the renowned 'Horizon' strand (directed by Johanna Gibbon), told the story of a Strategic Investments breakaway group, and revealed the science behind the winning formula.
• 'Double Down', an episode of Numb3rs concerned a counting group, led by a High School teacher, which launders money through casino winnings.

Other[edit]

Several members of the two teams have used their expertise to start public speaking careers as well as businesses teaching others how to count cards. For example:

• Mike Aponte of the Reptiles co-founded a company with former MIT Blackjack Team member David Irvine called the Blackjack Institute.
• Semyon Dukach of the Amphibians founded Blackjack Science.

Two Person Blackjack Team Members

References[edit]

1. ^Griffin, Peter A. (1979). The Theory of Blackjack. Huntington Press. ISBN0-915141-02-7.
2. ^'How a team of students beat the casinos'. BBC.com. Retrieved 26 May 2014.
3. ^Blackjack Forum interview with Johnny Chang
4. ^The Twenty One Club: The annual blackjack ball hosts Gambling's Most Furtive (and Quirky) FraternityArchived 2009-04-20 at the Wayback Machine cigaraficionado.com, Sept/Oct 1999
5. ^Ian Kaplan (March 2004). 'review of Bringing Down the House'.
6. ^ThePOGG (10 November 2012). 'ThePOGG Interviews – Semyon Dukach – MIT Card Counting team captain'.
7. ^'ThePOGG Interviews – Nathaniel Tilton author of 'The Blackjack Life''. Retrieved 6 March 2013.
8. ^The Last Casino on IMDb.Retrieved 2009-11-03.

External links[edit]