For a while there, we were the kings of this place.” “We just had a system that worked, and that’s not what the casinos are about. “There was nothing we did that was against the law,” he says. Ma, now 35 and an Internet gambling personality in San Francisco, seems equally proud and defensive about the group’s legacy, which gets the Hollywood treatment in the movie “21,” opening today. Of course, that “little bit of math” has gotten Ma and his former classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology banned from about every blackjack table in Vegas.Īnd thanks in part to the group’s profitable experiment in card counting – which took casinos for millions in the mid-1990s – your face is videotaped and run against a database of known counters when you walk into the city’s more hawkish casinos. “How do you not miss making that much money with a little bit of math?” “Sometimes, I do miss it,” Ma says, glancing at dealers who eye him as if he’s a shoplifter about to shove something in his jacket. It wasn’t that long ago when, on a good night, he and his buddies could walk away from Vegas with $900,000 in winnings stuffed in a duffel bag. LAS VEGAS – Jeff Ma walks past the blackjack tables at the Planet Hollywood casino and grins a little.
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