Inside the MIT Blackjack Team: The Real Secret to Success

Exploits of card counting team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that ripped off casinos for millions of dollars at the blackjack tables are legendary. The use of card counting systems and teamwork enabled them to carve out advantages against dealers, which they utilized perpetually, extensively, and ruthlessly. By the end of their astonishing run, the MIT Blackjack Team walked away with millions of dollars they’ve won by perfecting legitimate practices. Their table adventures are well documented through a couple of books and several movies, while their legacy in gambling lore is undisputable.

The majority of available public sources elaborate in detail about the team’s accomplishments, origins, , Atlantic City and Las Vegas visits, and the whole nine yard of their history. There’s probably not a single gambler that at least hasn’t once heard their story.

Quite often, this once-in-a-lifetime achievement is attributed to MIT-level genius team personnel that pulled off the unthinkable scheme. To no surprise: the no-schlub blackjack club predominantly consisted of students from MIT, Harvard University, Harvard Business School, Princeton, and the University of Chicago. Rocket scientists, indeed.

But…

…a bit more thorough read of interviews and first-hand s reveal underlying aspects and lessons worth mentioning and ing.

The success of the MIT Blackjack Team had little to do with brain powers of its — and this is not even remotely undermine the personal intelligence of these players; to the contrary, it’s to celebrate it, just on a different plane.

What made this team so unique and successful is the set of organizational rules and deployment principles they followed to the letter.

Inner Works

As Bill Kaplan — the leader of the MIT Blackjack Team and a 1980 Harvard MBA graduate — explains in his interview to Boston Magazine, “MIT was the only team who really won year over year, because we ran it like a business. Training, extensive training, checkout procedures, two hours of perfect play, leaving the table right [away]. It was really run more tightly than most businesses.”

Everything at the team was about the corporate structure and the uniform philosophy that, to a certain extent, resembles a military organization. The six-step foundations revolved around:

• The standard set of card counting procedures used by all
• Strict and demanding training protocol
• Disciplined bankroll management
• New ’ vetting and trial by fire examinations
• Well-governed funds split between players and investors
• Top-to-bottom general management of the whole endeavor.

Contrary to belief, not all team came from prestigious universities; some of them only had a high school education. Playing principles and card counting procedures originated in Ed Thorp’s book Beat the Dealer; Kaplan’s background in applied math, stats, and computer science was only a rather fertile soil for numbers’ crunching systems Thorp propagated.

In other words…

…the MIT Team just adopted the existing principles of blackjack. There were no revolutionary tactics at play there, except a well-proven set of playing rules learnable by anyone.

Elaborating on this particular detail, Kaplan says, “Honestly, just about anyone with a high school education can learn the game. […] Doing all the strategy and money managing can be tough, but as a player, it’s just some memorization.”

What separates this team from others was their inner work. 

Six-step foundations were the result of Kaplan’s meeting with J.P. Massar in May 1980. At the time, Massar — MIT student who attended the course “How to gamble if you must” wherein some of the original team met — was running his startup card counting squad while Kaplan was looking for a new one.

When Massar overheard Kaplan’s talk about his blackjack adventures at a local Chinese restaurant, the former introduced himself. He asked Kaplan to travel with his brand new team and critique their play. After a visit to Atlantic City casinos, Kaplan quickly realized potentials of Massar’s group, suggested a simplified counting strategy, and implemented uniformed procedures.

They’ve never looked back.

Rules of Engagement

Four years later, the MIT Blackjack Team had 35 players in the lineup. In time, the management roles changed — Kaplan decided to move onto running his other investments — and Massar, John Chang, Bill Rubin assumed governing duties. Original procedures, on the other hand, remained in place.

At its peak, the team had 80 . They played not only throughout the United States but in Europe as well. The deployment package consisted of three players with highly specialized roles — a big player, spotter, and controller.

The spotter would watch the game and count cards until the deck became positive, ready to be exploited. The controller would sit at the same table, placing small deposits. Once the controller verified the spotter’s count, the player would come and bet big on the spot, resembling a high roller. After two hours of play, they were gone.

Team resided from the East Coast to California. The training staff was in charge of geographically segmented parts of the country — Sarah McCord, for instance, was an instructor that trained West Coast players.

In 1992, the team was turned into LLC by creating Strategic Investments. The company’s purpose was to raise more funds from interested investors, some of whom earned as much as 300% return on their investments.

While the company did dissolve the next year — when the team, in effect, jumped the shark — the operations were ongoing to a certain extent until the early 2000s.

Only after terrorized casinos identified every single member of the team — the investigative process included using MIT and Harvard yearbooks to determine identities — did the MIT Blackjack Team finally stop operations and disband.

However…

…the astonishing success was, in reality, based on strict guidelines and supreme discipline in corporate-like run operations.

Escapade’s Takeaways

Judging by the personal of one of the founders — which, truth be told, resembles the conventional wisdom — there’s much to learn from this story, regardless of our skill levels.

Blackjack is all about standardization. A proven strategy is well-known; winning is about the focus and the repetition of accumulated knowledge. No deviations, no shortcuts, no omissions here, just plain and straightforward adherence.

There’s no substitute for training in any walk of life. People practice for anything impactful they have to face. Yes, it’s tough, it’s demanding, sometimes even dull, but when we’re about to invest money, the training becomes more critical than ever.

As Kaplan notes, “Most teams fail on the money management. They never make it to the long run.” The notion does not have to relate to teams only, but players as well. Hence the responsibly set deposit- and loss-limits, prudently devised duration of each session regardless of the outcome, and almost religious devotion to discipline.

Just as the MIT guys vetted new and used trial by fire tests to evaluate the worthiness of each new addition to the team, we can do the same for every novel blackjack practice] we consider relevant. It’s not so much about trial-and-error as it’s about whether it’s for us or not. To have an internal vetting procedure to evaluate everything we face is a mandatory prerequisite, particularly when it comes to gambling.

Each pro player has a percentage of bankroll that it puts back into circulation and a certain amount of funds that it sets aside for additional investments — the latter is to serve for rainy days. All of us can have similar sharing ethics worked through in a precise manner. We all have different monetary requirements, but such basic principles can only do us right.

To remain steadily devoted to those practices is not a question of the democratic experiment. Of course, we’re all humans, prone to misjudgments and mistakes, but keeping the gambling equation in a positive balance requires disciplined general management of ourselves.

And…

…while sometimes these simple steps tend to resemble much ado about nothing, the simple truth is: They work!

Casinos never faced coordinated effort on a scale of the MIT Blackjack Team in the history of gambling. The sheer volume of operations, commitment to playing guidelines, and relentless discipline in bankroll management made them living nightmare for brick-and-mortar venues around the world.

When we compound this story with other characteristics of twenty-one — low house edge plus generally more suppressed luck effect than in other games — one question emerges. Why don’t we try to adopt the strategic principles of the MIT Blackjack Team and follow them to the letter while we play?

We don’t have to walk out with millions of dollars, and we most certainly won’t. Instead, we might lose less by increasing the levels of our gambling responsibility and, above all, have infinitely more fun while we play.

That’s what we, the players, can do. The rest is up to luck. And, that seems like a fair deal.