Connoisseurs in the Blackjack Card Counting World

Back in the 1990’s, Mike Aponte and Dave Irvine, two former Massachusetts Institute of Technology students teamed with other four classmates and took Las Vegas casinos for millions by counting cards at blackjack tables.

At the Global Gaming Expo the two tell the audience that they are no longer active participants but the practice of card counting at blackjack tables still carries on across North America.

However, the two didn’t leave the gaming world. They own the Blackjack Institute where gamblers can teach blackjack playing strategies and systems and they also help casino executives understand ways to protect their games.

The gambling adventures of the six MIT students were depicted in a 2002 book and also a movie based on the book is expected to be released in 28 March 2008. The book was a New York Times' best-seller by Ben Mezrich named "Bringing down the House". The movie was filmed in Las Vegas, starring Kevin Spacey and Laurence Fishburne and is called simple but explanatory to the story, “21”.

Irvine and Aponte said they are the only two from the old team of six MIT students who remained to use blackjack to move into the mainstream business community. The others are having “normal jobs” out of the gaming world.

About the best seller written in 2002, Irvine said that told the accurate story of the MIT students who used a blackjack card counting technique developed by an MIT professor in the 1960s, turning betting on blackjack into a business. Teams of students regularly came home from weekend gambling larks with a $100,000 earning. The biggest Las Vegas weekend was a profit of $500,000.

"The movie is a fictionalized account of a book that took a lot of freedoms," Irvine said. "All the names are invented and the characters are on the whole caricatures. The book story by large is 100 percent correct with a bit of editorializing."
Players that use the blackjack card counting method by determining how many face cards and aces are still in a game, is not illegal. Aponte, who was the basis for the Jason Fisher character in "Bringing down the House," said the practice is familiar in casinos with card counters using the same methods as the MIT team used back in the 1990’s.

The two said that they were so successful back then first of all because casinos didn't exchange information. They could have played been caught and then banned from a casino, but could easily move to another Strip resort.

In the end, casinos began using technology-based systems in the surveillance rooms to spot and remove advantage players. By 2000, the casinos had caught on to the MIT team, and the players were banned from casinos.

Recently, Mike Aponte tried to play blackjack in a Caribbean casino but he was stopped after he was spotted by high-tech facial recognition methods.

Irvine smiles and says: Casinos improved their methods to spot and ban advantage gamblers but we improved also. I know a way to beat casinos with a different twist than the old-fashioned counting cards way and that's what the casinos need to stay up on. I'm not going to tell you what it is.