Busting Vegas a non-fiction book by Ben Mezrich

Ben Mezrich

Ben Mezrich is an American author from Princeton, New Jersey. He graduated magna-cum-laude with a degree in Social Studies from Harvard University in 1991. Some of his books have been written under the pseudonym Holden Scott. Mezrich attended Princeton Day School, in Princeton, New Jersey...

, author of New York Times Best Seller Bringing Down the House

Bringing Down the House (book)

Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions is a book by Ben Mezrich about a group of MIT card counters commonly known as the MIT Blackjack Team. While represented as non-fiction by Mezrich and Free Press, the book contains significant fictional elements...

. It describes the gambling activities of a group of MIT students who in the early 1990s made millions by using their mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 and card skills to change the odds of blackjack

Blackjack

Blackjack, also known as Twenty-one or Vingt-et-un , is the most widely played casino banking game in the world...

 in their favor.

The story follows Semyon Dukach

Semyon Dukach

Semyon Dukach is the CEO of SMTP, Inc., and a former professional blackjack player with the MIT Blackjack Team. He played with Strategic Investments and later was one of the founding members and team leaders on Amphibian Investments whose exploits were chronicled in Ben Mezrich’s Busting Vegas...

, and his activities over the course of less than a year. The MIT students do not count cards as they do in Mezrich's other book Bringing Down the House, but rather follow the bottom card in the shoe, and maximize their profits based on the card.