The MIT Blackjack TeamAnyone who knows anything about the history of blackjack in general and the history of blackjack card counting in particular has heard of the MIT Blackjack Team. The MIT Team is to blackjack what the crew of Apollo 11 is to space exploration - pioneering legends that will be remembered forever.
Though members of the MIT Blackjack Team were not astronauts, many were science and math geniuses and there were many "space cadets" in the group. What they actually were was a group of blackjack-loving, card-counting students who decided to take Ken Uston's advice in "The Big Player" and beat the casinos at the game of blackjack.
Blackjack card counting, the core of the Team's system, is a proven winning technique - for those who have the discipline and smarts to master it. But solo successful card counters were easy to spot and they were repeatedly ejected from casinos. Enter Ken Uston and his theories that team playing was the way to put one over on the casinos. With techniques honed after hours of training and practice, teams like the MIT Team would go into casinos and take them for millions of dollars. Their actions were disguised and camouflaged and it took the casinos - and the Griffin Investigation Agency - years to figure it all out.
The MIT Blackjack Team Confounded the CasinosThe modus operandi of the MIT Team was sly and ingenious. They didn't acknowledge each other's presence when they were working a table. Each member had a role, usually one of three positions - spotters, gorillas, and the big players. The spotters would sit at the table, playing the minimum bet while doing what they came to do - counting the cards.
When the odds were looking particularly good they'd signal actively playing team members, called "gorillas" and "big players," who didn't didn't count cards at all; their part in the play was to bet big when the spotter told them to and lay low when they got that signal, as well. The spotter himself - the real card counter - would always bet conservatively and consistently so as not to draw attention to himself. This system of team play was a huge success for over a decade - in the 80s and 90s - with team membership fluctuating and different teams forming, disbanding, re-forming and so on. Through it all, Johnny Chang was the manager of the team, the steady force that kept it all going.
The Casinos Fight BackCasinos, initially confounded by the MIT Blackjack Team and their wily ways, finally decided to get tough and they hired Griffin Investigations to track them down and weed them out. Griffin spent over 25 years developing new methods of information gathering, making it their goal to catch card counters for the blackjack casinos that employed them. |
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They developed the Griffin Book, an album of pictures, names, aliases, and even home addresses and phone numbers of the gamblers who won too much too often, including MIT Team members. By the end of the 1990s, the Griffin Agency had pretty much shut them down. (Ultimately vengeful and angry card counters led to the counter-demise of Griffin, too.) No good thing lasts forever, but the MIT Blackjack Team had a spectacular, lucrative and legendary run at the blackjack tables.
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