21 (2008)

September 12, 2014 8:21 PM

"21" is the fact-based story about six MIT students who were trained to become experts in card counting and subsequently took Vegas casinos for millions in winnings.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (2 comments total)

Isn't this the film where they took a bunch of Asian students and made them white?
posted by happyroach at 12:14 AM on September 14, 2014

happyroach: Yes, depending on what you mean. The actual MIT blackjack "team" existed for many years in a number of different compositions, and the book apparently created composites and relayed anecdotes in ways that obscured identities, whether or not the author actually determined who they depicted. This MIT review stated:
Another possibility is that the account in Bringing Down the House is exaggerated. As I've noted, Ben Mezrich is more a B-grade thriller writer than a journalist. While card counting is not illegal, it is a covert activity. As William Bennett found out, spending your time in gambling dens is not considered a respectable pastime, like golf. People are reluctant to talk about their experiences making the account difficult to verify. So it is possible that Ben Mezrich or the people who told him the story related in Bringing Down the House exaggerated. There are many "true stories" which don't seem entirely true on closer examination.

An excerpt from the book Bringing Down the House was published in Wired (back when Wired mattered).
posted by dhartung at 5:38 PM on September 15, 2014 [1 favorite]