The Hot Shoe is a 2005

2005 in film

- Highest-grossing films :Please note that following the tradition of the English-language film industry, these are the top-grossing films that were first released in the United States in 2005...

 documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 about card counting

Card counting

Card counting is a casino card game strategy used primarily in the blackjack family of casino games to determine whether the next hand is likely to give a probable advantage to the player or to the dealer. Card counters, also known as advantage players, attempt to decrease the inherent casino house...

. Director David Layton interviewed current and former card counters, including members of the MIT Blackjack Team

MIT Blackjack Team

The MIT Blackjack Team was a group of students and ex-students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, and other leading colleges who used card-counting techniques and more sophisticated strategies to beat casinos at blackjack worldwide...

, casino employees and gambling authors and combined it with behind-the-scenes footage of casino surveillance rooms and the MIT team preparing to hit the tables. Layton learned how to count cards and gambled with $5,000 of the film's budget as a "case study." The film tells about mathematical aspects of card counting and explains in details elements of blackjack winning; this is the movie which also reveals the history and development of card counting.
Some of the blackjack

Blackjack

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

 players interviewed for The Hot Shoe include:

• Ian Andersen
• Andy Bloch
  Andy Bloch
  Andrew Elliot Bloch is a professional poker player. He holds two electrical engineering degrees from MIT and a JD from Harvard Law School.-Poker:...
  
  
• Anthony Curtis
  Anthony Curtis
  Anthony Curtis is a blackjack player, gambling expert, and author. He is also the publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor, a popular newsletter first published in 1983, about getting good deals in Las Vegas. Curtis became interested in gambling at the age of 16 when he received a book about blackjack as...
  
  
• Peter Griffin
• Tommy Hyland
  Thomas Hyland
  Thomas Hyland is a well known card counter at the casino card game of blackjack. Since 1979, he has also been the manager of the longest-running blackjack team in history....
  
  
• Max Rubin
  Max Rubin
  Max Rubin is a gambling expert and author best known for his book Comp City: A Guide to Free Gambling Vacations. The book teaches players how to maximize casino perks with little actual wagering. Rubin is also a gambling analyst for television...
  
  
• Ralph Stricker
• Edward Thorp
• Olaf Vancura
• Stanford Wong
  Stanford Wong
  Stanford Wong is the pen name of John Ferguson, a gambling author who is best known for his book Professional Blackjack, which was first published in 1975 and is still in print. Wong's computer program "Blackjack Analyzer", initially created for personal use, was one of the first pieces of...