Do One Thing Well: 21

21 is a movie about ripping off big casinos.

Based on a true story, an MIT professor and some students cheat at Black Jack to win millions of dollars from Vegas casinos. Here's how they did it:

You can beat the odds if you can memorize all the cards that are shown and have been shown. If you know what's been played, you can make better guesses as to what cards will come next. If you do this well enough, you get a greater than 50% chance of winning money over time than losing it. Casinos know this so they play with 12 decks of cards, they shuffle every 5 hands, and they make it nearly impossible for even the best card counters to keep track.

To get around this, card counters developed more sophisticated systems than simply memorizing every card. By assigning cards point values, you can add the values as cards are played and keep general track of whether a deck is "hot" or not, without necessarily being able to list everything that's been played. This is oversimplified cause I don't actually know how to do it, if I did I wouldn't be fucking blogging about it, or blogging at all. But suffice it to say these systems exist. This is what the MIT guys were doing, but they also went a step further. Card counting, in whatever form, is not illegal. But casinos will kick you out for doing it.

Casinos generally catch people who count cards by watching how they bet. If you bet the minimum over and over again and then suddenly slap 100,000 dollars on the table, it looks pretty suspicious. Since counters know when a deck is hot or cold, they wait out the cold hands with low bets until they're due for a hot one, then throw down a lot of money. It's effective, but attracts a lot of attention.

The extra step is this: One person can't bet erratically without being noticed, but two people can. Somebody plays at a table, betting the minimum over and over again as people in Vegas do all the time. But they also count the cards. When the deck gets hot, they signal a teammate around the corner. That person sits and immediately throws down six figures on the hand like it was no thing.

You have a few people play the minimum at different tables and one big money guy wait for the signals and bounce from table to table playing only hot decks. To the watchful eyes at casinos, it just looks like one guy betting a ton of money and winning. How could he be counting cards? He just sat down. Pretty fascinating right?

The problem is that 21 isn't about that. It's about a wonderkid and his Oedipus battles with professor Kevin Spacey. It's also about his geekiness giving way to Armani suits and enticing the hot blond team member into bed. All the while he's living double lives, Vegas on weekends, MIT on weekdays, and his geeky robotics friends are mad because he doesn't return their phone calls. Then there's Lawrence Fishburne who's hunting Kevin Spacey because of some longstanding feud. Had the movie stuck to the real story, it would have been way more interesting.

Here's how the real MIT guys got caught, by the way. Slightly different than in the movie. One of the guys who always bet the minimum was at a bar. By coincidence a notorious card counter who now worked as a watcher for a casino was also in the bar. They got to talking and the watcher realized the MIT guy was smart and knew how to count cards, so he started watching him at the tables. He wondered, if this guy is so smart, why does he bet so dumb? When the deck was hot, he was still betting the minimum. So he kept watching him until he realized that he was working in conjunction with other people. They got caught. I think at least one went to jail. Somebody probably got their ass beat.



2.5 stars - wasted potential
Similar to: Rounders, House of Games, Boiler Room