the 3500

The film ‘21′ is based on the book ‘Bringing Down the House: How Six Students Took Vegas for Millions’ (by Ben Mezrich), which I found to be reasonably interesting and faced paced. I regret watching the film, however, as it didn’t add anything other than a few Hollywood plot twists.

Here are some quotes from the book:

“Overall, the team was still way up on the month. But it was a painful lesson to learn all at once. No matter the count, the cards could go bad. Over time, winning was inevitable, a matter of pure math. But in the short run, the game could go either way. Even math left room for luck.”

“Let’s assume you have a roughly 2% edge over the casino. …you need to have enough money to withstand any variant swings against you. A rule of thumb is that you should have at least a hundred basic units. Assuming you start with ten thousand dollars, you could comfortably play a hundred dollar unit.”

“He remembered what Micky had said when they kicked him off the team: The most important decision a card counter ever has to make is the decision to walk away.”

“Blackjack is the only game in the casino that is beatable over an extended period of time, because blackjack is subject to continuous probability. This simply means that what you see affects what you are going to see. Blackjack is a game with a memory. If an ace comes out in the first round of blackjack shoe, that means there is one less ace left in the rest of the deck…in other words, the past has an affect on the future.”