abstract:The MIT Blackjack Team was a group of students and ex-students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, and other leading colleges who used card counting techniques and more sophisticated strategies to beat casinos at blackjack worldwide. The team and its successors operated successfully from 1979 through the beginning of the 21st century.
He was prepared for the odd world of quants, he said, by playing on the MITblackjack team--a different version of the team portrayed in the movie 21, in which a group of students figured out that with investor backing, they could consistently beat the house in Las Vegas by counting cards.