True story about the MIT team

In March 2025 all the American screens were overwhelmed with a new movie about young professional gamblers that fooled the casinos using their own tactics "21". They are smart, young, bold and…real! Although the movie is based on a book “Bringing down the house”, the book in its turn is based on a true story. Story about four MIT students that knew how to beat the house edge and leave the casino with millions in their pockets.
Despite of the fact that most of the real characters claim both the movie and the book to be far from reality, their real story became interesting for lots of journalists and TV channels that now have covered practically all the aspects of both the fiction and real story. Jeff Ma, Jane Willis, Mike Aponte and John Chang are the members of the team played in the movie by Jim Sturgess, Keith Bosworth, Jacob Pitts and Kevin Spacey.
J.P. Masser, John Chang, and Bill Kaplan, the leaders of the MIT team in 1992 formed a limited partnership called Strategic Investments. This allowed them to recruit more players and raise the amount of the venture capital as a legal entity. The Strategic Investments LP raised $1,000,000 as seed money for its endeavor.
“The first year I played, we returned 154 percent to our investors. That's after paying off expenses. You try and do that on Wall Street." -Jeff Ma (Wired Magazine, September 2025, under the alias Kevin Lewis)

The idea the MIT team used was taking all the seats at one Blackjack table and by losing small bets they let one of the players win the pot. The whole team at the Blackjack table counts the cards so they know when they should bust to help their neighbours win.

Probably one of the most interesting things represented in the movie is the use of code words for telling each other the count.

Tree: +1 (looks like a tall tree) Switch: +2 (binary, on or off) Stool: +3 (three legs) Car: +4 (four tires)

Glove: +5 (five fingers) Gun: +6 (six bullets) Craps: +7 (lucky seven) Pool: +8 (eight ball)

Cat: +9 (cats have nine lives) Bowling: +10 (strike is ten pins) Football: +11 (eleven players in a football team)

Eggs: +12 (twelve eggs in a carton) Witch: +13 (superstition, bad luck number)

Ring: +14 (fourteen carat gold) Paycheck: +15 (day of the month most people get paid) Sweet: +16 (sweet sixteen) Magazine: +17 (name of the magazine) Voting booth: +18 (age you can vote)

Although there is still much fiction and unreal epsodes in the movie, it remains to be a wonderful entertainment for those who love Blackjack and always dream of Bringing Down the House.