Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees

Mezrich, the author of previous bestsellers about MIT gamblers and a colorful Ivy League trader in Japan, tells how Dukach's crew used a system that Vegas had never seen before. Dukach, the son of Russian immigrants who grew up in the poorest neighborhoods of New Jersey and Houston, was determined to climb out of poverty and help his family. His system didn't involve the commonly used techniques of card counting. Posing as an arms dealer or dentist, Dukach deliberately sought out blackjack dealers with small hands or thin fingers who frequently didn't conceal the bottom card when they shuffled the cards. Dukach would often manage to get a glimpse at the bottom card. This was highly significant because it was the card the dealer would hand the player to cut the deck. Dukach had practiced a technique to insert the card in a precise spot in the deck and then make big bets when the card was dealt. Dukach and his team ended up barred from casinos, threatened at gunpoint, and beaten in Vegas's notorious back rooms. This is a riveting yarn. —Alex Roslin

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

entertaining, but there are better novels, 2008-08-19
This book is pretty much an advertisement for one of the subject's seminars. So many things in this are clearly fabricated. If a casino sees you make hugely varying bets and coming out ahead, they will ask you to leave, ban you from the casino, then share your picture with the other casinos. It's actually fairly easy to beat blackjack, but it's hard to do it without the casino.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

A True Page Turner, 2008-08-19
For the longest time, I thought Busting Vegas and Bringing Down the House were the same book with different titles. After not being thrilled with Mezrich's RIGGED, I ran into Busting Vegas at a nearby bookstore and realized that indeed it was a completely different book than BDTH.

I thoroughly enjoyed this very entertaining account of a completely different formula to "Beat the House" than card counting. If you have read Mezrich's other works and enjoyed them, as well as enjoy the game of blackjack, I think you cannot go wrong with this one. The characters are vivid and the story telling is rich and vivid with detail.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

easy-to-read trashy fiction with ridiculous self-justification squeezed in, 2008-08-08
if this book were simply an exciting fast-paced story (albeit poorly written), i would rate it 2 stars

unfortunately, about halfway through it goes moralistic with dripping hypocrisy - a completely unnecessary element that i found highly annoying. an example from page 151:

"'okay,' victor said as he surveyed the group, lined up on the balcony, blue water behind them, the glass casino glowing on the horizon. 'let's show this little island what a bit of math, in the right hands, can do to balance out a few hundred years of economic oppression, shall we?'

semyon grinned, and barely felt the pinch of his still bruised lower lip. robin hood had nothing on them"

just like robin hood - except they keep the money for themselves (MIT/harvard students)

the 'afterword' takes the ridiculous moral justification a few steps further. an example from page 283/4:

"for me and my teammates, beating the casinos has never been entirely about the money. of course the money was important, and on the surface, the whole enterprise may have even resembled a kind of crazy financial start-up on steroids, but anyone looking deeper would have seen that for us, the blackjack team was not a business, but a passionate, desperate struggle against the mighty evil empire that was and continues to be the casino industry... inspired by the success of open source, i've come to believe that to really make a substantial impact against a powerful adversary like the casino industry, you have to sacrifice the short term profits of a select few in order to enable the masses to cooperate and innovate... once this book is published, millions of people will get exposure to some of our key methods"

uhhh.. what?!!!! the book is glammed to the max with regard to gambling (the cover is no anomaly) and somehow it's still a "desperate struggle against the mighty evil empire"? comparing casino cheating to a productive venture - like a startup or successful open source teams - is ridiculous

with a world of other books to read, i do not recommend this one


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Smart and rich, 2008-03-09
A great tale compellingly told. Would have been nice to have had some of the math exposed in an appendix for those who care, but a grand story


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Not that great, 2008-01-23
Technically, this is not a sequel to Bringing Down the House. The characters are different, and they are not card counters. Yet this story of MIT kids who used a new system to gain an advantage (and millions) playing blackjack feels very much like Bringing Down the House II. There's the genius leader, the beautiful girl, and the brilliant kid who's the main character in the story and writes the afterword. There's blackjack, Vegas, Atlantic City, and even a trip to the Caribbean gone awry.

Obviously, Mezrich found a winner with his previous bestselling book and here he simply tried to duplicate his successful formula. Unfortunately, the result feels a little like painting by the numbers -- unoriginal and uninspired.

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