MIT card counting strategy

(Updated, March 27, 6:45 pm—see editor’s note, p. 2)

The house was on Inman Street, near Cambridge’s Central Square. Peter Woit recalls the morning he came downstairs and found his roommate obviously upset.

“John, what’s wrong?” he asked.

“Have you seen a dirty pink laundry bag?” came the response.

“No, why?”

“There was $80, 000 in it.”

This was back in 1987 or ’88—still pretty early days for the MIT blackjack team. In fact, in those days John didn’t even think of it as the MIT team because it included players from around Boston and even other schools, like Princeton. John was John Chang. He had graduated from MIT a couple years earlier with a major in electrical engineering and gone on to become one of the lead organizers of a group of young card-counters who were largely having their way in Atlantic City casinos and making occasional forays to Las Vegas. For his day job, Chang worked in Kendall Square, right above Legal Sea Foods, as senior software engineer at a computer aided design company called Premise.

In case you missed all the trailers and ads, the opening of 21—the movie adaptation of Bringing Down the House, the smash 2002 book about the MIT blackjack team—is set for tomorrow. But we wanted to tell you some parts of story that you haven’t heard if you read the book, that you won’t see if you go to the movie—and that reveal how intertwined Boston’s innovation history and MIT’s blackjack legacy are. For instance, one of the founders of Premise was Chang’s fellow card-counter Jon Hirschtick, who after selling the firm to Computervision in 1991 would go on to found the software design firm SolidWorks, one of New England’s big success stories of the 1990s (it was sold to Dassault Systemes for some $316 million in stock in 1997).

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