Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
by Ben Mezrich
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ben MezrichEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2003-09-09
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 257
Publisher: Free Press
Book Reviews of Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
Book Review: A Narrative History of 21: fact mixed with fiction
Summary: 4 Stars
I enjoy playing a little blackjack here and there, some poker at times, so I was interested to read 21, especially after I had watched the movie. I was extremely surprised to find that the book was so much more that the boiled down movie. Granted, I know books are always better than the movie it is based off of, but this seem to be in a complete different ball park. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the account of the MIT card counters in Las Vegas.
The book is interesting because you get a progressively more and more complex and threatened lifestyle as you move through time. This injects natural adrenaline and action into each new chapter. There was always the threat of violence in the background, even though counting is legal, so you continually read on as you anticipate the conflict as it brews. I was sad when I was done reading it and there was no more to read, but in the same light it had also come to a natural conclusion that felt right.
On the other side I was a little saddened as well by a simple Google search that showed that Mezrich admitted to slightly fictionalizing some of the story. This goes without saying in most nonfiction, though, as the narrative effect that makes it so readable, that I expected this was the case before I did a little research. Obviously a lot of the sidelines of the other characters, like Fisher and Martinez when they went out of country to gamble, where fiction, building a story around rumor (such as hearing that they had conflict and were banned, and that Fisher had a black eye; the guess is the narrative around this story that Mezrich used).
In the end I really didn't care. I know there was truth to a lot of the basic facts of the MIT team, and that there was fiction around some of the more fascinating aspects, but when it all came down to it it was an enjoyable read. Enough said for me. I would recommend to others despite learning that some of the story was fictionalized.
4 stars.
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Summary of Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
#1 National Bestseller!The amazing inside story about a gambling ring of M.I.T.students who beat the system in Vegas -- and lived to tell how.
Robin Hood meets the Rat Pack when the best and the brightest of M.I.T.'s math students and engineers take up blackjack under the guidance of an eccentric mastermind. Their small blackjack club develops from an experiment in counting cards on M.I.T.'s campus into a ring of card savants with a system for playing large and winning big. In less than two years they take some of the world's most sophisticated casinos for more than three million dollars. But their success also brings with it the formidable ire of casino owners and launches them into the seedy underworld of corporate Vegas with its private investigators and other violent heavies.
Filled with tense action, high stakes, and incredibly close calls, Bringing Down the House is a nail-biting read that chronicles a real-life Ocean's Eleven. It's one story that Vegas does not want you to read.
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