21, Bringing Down the House and the real players

Based on the non-fiction novel Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezerich, 21 has a lot to live up to if it wants to top the book’s skillful storytelling. The book documents the ins and outs of team member Kevin Lewis, the highs and lows of the card-counting lifestyle, the wild dichotomy of a blackjack team, and explains how a group of college students legally won millions at the blackjack tables.

Having found an audience that bridged the generation gap, Bringing Down the House vaulted Mezerich to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, and the story eventually found its way to Spacey, who took an immediate interest in the project. After a short courtship, Spacey and Mezerich joined forces for 21, and the rest, as they say, is history.

As with any Hollywood story, Bringing Down the House and 21 take some dramatic license, changing some of the details of the team’s story to make it palatable for audiences. So to separate fact from fi ction, BLUFF tracked down the real-life inspirations for two of the main characters in the book, Jeffrey Ma and Mike Aponte.

The inspiration for Bringing Down the House and a catalyst for the book and movie’s creation, Ma was fi rst introduced to the team by its legend, which circulated in the back halls of the MIT campus. Ma would eventually be recruited to team member Mike Aponte, who in the book goes by the name Fischer. Ma quickly went on to take a leadership role on the team, becoming a big player who frequently wagered $10,000 a hand in the prestigious high-limit blackjack salons of Vegas. In essence, Ma’s job was to act like a high roller and capitalize when team members called him in to a table that had a count in the favor of the team.

When the Bringing Down the House team fi nally began to disband in 2000, Ma ran into Mezerich at a party and fl oated the idea of doing a book about his experiences. Needless to say, Mezerich saw the value of writing such a story and the book concept was born.

First introduced to the team by friends of friends and eventually learning that his roommates were on the team, it wasn’t long before Ma was asking his friends if he could tag along. “I was like ‘Wow, can I come hang out with you guys?’ and they said I’d have to learn the system if I wanted to be a part of the team.”

To then-freshman Ma, the biggest motivating factor for joining the team was the friendships that came with the close-knit group, but that didn’t last long. “I wanted to go hang out with my friends in Vegas, but eventually the money became the real driving force and that is when I started taking it more seriously,” he said.

But to become a part of the team, Ma said he had to show profi ciency in the basics and an aptitude for dealing with the public: “You had to learn how to be a spotter and perfect those skills. The guys in charge also had to see you as someone that could potentially become a good player and make a lot of money. I guess they saw me as that and wanted to give me a shot.”

Equally gifted with the math necessary to be a part of the team and the persona that seemingly appeased almost everyone he came in contact with, Ma had all of the characteristics necessary to become what is known as a “big player.” According to Ma, he was comfortable in the role. “I was defi nitely good at betting and playing the part of a big player. I’ve always been good at dealing with people and that is important when playing. You had to be able to convince people that you were really a high roller and not some MIT student there to count cards.”

Although he was a big player, Ma’s lifestyle wasn’t that different from those of his teammates, despite fi nding he had different motivations for being on the team. “We are all doing the same things with the same potential issues. I guess one of the biggest differences was that for some of the team members, blackjack was their only thing. It was very important for them to make as much money as possible. For me, blackjack was just a means to an end. It wasn’t the only thing I did and I always had other things going on in addition to blackjack. I worked while I played on the team, while others didn’t have jobs,” he said.

But, according to Ma, he had no idea what was coming. “I don’t think anyone thought we would be as successful as we were during this period. That’s like asking whether we thought the book (Bringing Down the House) was going to be successful or not. We really had no idea.”

With so many brilliant minds on the team, small differences of opinion were common among team members. From Ma’s perspective, the group initially got along well, but the honeymoon didn’t last long. “I guess it depends on what time frame you were talking about. There were defi nitely moments when we had our differences. I think that is because we had different motivations for being on the team. Some people were more ‘blackjack lifers’ while others were doing it because it was a fun thing to do with our friends and an easy way to make money. It wasn’t like we lived or died blackjack.”

In addition to being able to do the math and handle the social aspect of being a big player, Ma had other qualities necessary that helped him fl eece casino after casino. “You have to be able to deal with a lot of potential crisis situations. You can’t get stressed out and you can’t get upset when you lose. You can’t win every time. You have to have a lot of confi dence and believe in your system so that when an individual hand doesn’t work out, you keep playing. You’re not going to win every time no matter how good a counter you are. It is important to understand that.”

With each new casino came a new set of challenges for the so-called whale thanks to the heavy security presence. “It was nerve wracking in the beginning. You have no idea how the security is going to react. You really didn’t know if they already knew you were a counter because your picture was in a book that they had seen you in. There is a lot of uncertainty when you fi rst sit down, but there is also a lot of exhilaration when you have a chance to put up money and win. It is like starting a new job every day,” he said.

Although he felt somewhat shaky in the fi rst moments on the fl oor, Ma said he was fully capable of reigning in his emotions. “I think you get into the game and it (the nervousness) fades away. It’s like playing in a big sporting match. It takes you a minute to get into the game, but once the game starts, you fall into a rhythm.”

Like superstar athletes, Ma regularly became blackjack’s big-league hitter, stepping up to the plate for his team on a daily basis and knocking the ball out of the park with ease. After his fi rst big win at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas, it wasn’t long before Ma felt completely in command. He soon experienced great success thanks to the system, setting personal records; one weekend session he earned a cool $120,000. He also helped the team take down several monster cashes including one weekend of action in which the team collected $450,000. “There were months where I repeatedly won hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he said.

When he did lose, the pain came in spades, with his biggest loss coming in just two hands. Ma recalled. “I lost $100,000 at Caesars in Las Vegas. That was much more memorable than my biggest win.”

Traveling weekend after weekend, the team frequented a number of different casinos in Las Vegas, but they didn’t just stick to Sin City. “Back in those days, the MGM was pretty hot. It was a great place to try and beat. It was kind of like the Costco of the casino industry. There were just so many tables and it gave us a great opportunity to beat them. There was a casino in Chicago called the Grand Victoria and we use to play there a lot. I also really loved the Mirage because it was such a nice place,” he said.

With each new casino came a new set of challenges for the young hotshot. “There were a lot of differences. Some casinos were smarter than others and some took action differently than the others. There were certain casinos where if you bet a $1,000 hand, you were going to get a lot of attention. You had to work hard to throw them off of what you are doing. The actual art of card counting is not very hard to recognize once you know what you are looking for. You’ve got to do a good job changing things up and not give signals that you are counting cards. That is often easier said than done. You had to mix things up constantly. You didn’t just count. You also did shuffl e tracking and tried to capitalize on cuts as well. You really had to try and mix things up.”

To fl y under the radar of security, Ma used a number of different aliases and personas. His favorite was that he was a venture capitalist from Silicon Valley because he found that he had a knack for appearing as though he knew what he was talking about. “I was 21, so making up that kind of story was very amusing. I didn’t know anything about venture capital back then, so it was fun. One time I met these women and after a while they ended up showing me their business plan and I made some comments and helped them with their business. That was when realized that maybe this whole venture thing wasn’t that diffi cult,” he said.

In the end, Ma admits that being team was an amazing experience and that despite what many may say, it wasn’t all about the money. “I loved the whole idea of beating the house and I loved doing it with a crew of my friends. There is a tremendous sense of camaraderie that you get in a situation like that. Any time you can band together is exciting, especially when you beating a casino. It was a fun thing to do.

Described in Bringing Down the as one of the team leaders and portrayed somewhat as the book’s “heavy” Mezerich, Mike Aponte has established himself as somewhat of a blackjack legend. Having recruited Jeff Ma MIT team and being involved with card-counting teams during one team’s previous incarnations known Strategic Investment (an earlier team that did not prove to be successful for a variety of reasons), Aponte took the game very seriously during his tenure as one of the team’s managers.

Despite the book’s suggestion of his ruthless determination and highly aggressive alpha-male personality, Aponte comes across differently in real life and he readily talks about the book, what life on the team was like for him, and the team’s legacy.

According to Aponte, despite the team’s success, he had no clue that the team’s story would play out in front of movie fans. “Given the nature of our business, it was in the best interest to be anonymous. I never had any idea that the story would go public, much less gain the notoriety that it did. I think it was a huge surprise to the team that the public took to it.”

Although he now sees the benefi t of the story’s success, at fi rst, he wasn’t sure what to make of it and was concerned that people would get the wrong impression of the team. “On the one hand, our story getting the notoriety didn’t hurt because we were pretty much done playing by then. If I were still active, it would have been a different story. In the end, the book has helped in the sense that blackjack tournaments came as a result of the book’s popularity. When it fi rst came out, I did have my reservations, because it was sold as non-fi ction and not everything was a 100 percent accurate; but over time I’ve come to accept that. Ultimately, I think Mezerich did a good job of capturing the overall premise of what we did.”

Aponte said that he and the rest of the team had no clue as to the blockbuster potential of the the team’s story. “We never saw it coming. It was just happenstance. I know you should never say never, but if it weren’t for Mezerich hearing about it through a friend, I don’t think the story would have gone public.”

First attracted to the lifestyle thanks to the perks, Aponte soon found more reasons for being a part of the team. “When you can go to a casino and get treated like royalty, that has a lot of appeal to a 21-year-old. I also liked the strategic and mathematical aspects of the game. When I really got serious about it, I enjoyed the art of card counting. The math may have been important, but there was an art to fooling the casino and being believable. I think it was the combination of the math component and the cloak-and-dagger lifestyle that I enjoyed the most.”

In addition to mastering the art of counting, Aponte became hooked on the rebellious nature of beating the house. “In the beginning, it wasn’t the main motivation. Early on, it was about the material payout that mattered most, but once I got into it and our team became successful, beating the house did become a motivation. In a sense, they were who we were playing against. It was natural for us to take on a bit of an underdog mentality and for us to try and take down the big bad casinos, especially when they were trying to thwart our efforts and prevent us from playing.”

According to Aponte, the team was in full control of its fi nancial destiny for a long period of time, but it was no easy task to keep the group afl oat, thanks to the logistics of running a team. “The period of the team that Bringing Down the House featured (1994-2000) was when we really made money. That incarnation of the team was fully self-invested. Only players were allowed to invest. I started off in the beginning investing $1,500, because that was the minimum you needed to invest to play so that everyone had something at stake. Obviously I did well with the player compensation and as time went by I did become more heavily involved on the investor side.

Everyone on the team made money as both players and investors; sometimes more as one than the other. Aponte said that he became a bigger investor percentage-wise as his responsibilities expanded to include recruiting players, training players, and coordinating trips. “The business model of a blackjack card-counting team is pretty simple to lay out,” he said, “but it’s not that easy to keep a team going. It’s hard to fi nd the right team and train them the right way. Behind the sexiness of what we did, the key was just the practices we had in a nondescript MIT style.”

Finding quick success with the team, Aponte pushed to bring Ma into the fold, thanks to his trustworthy personality. “Jeff and I were friends. I actually met him playing pickup basketball. I trusted him and that was a big thing. It is such a unique business in that it is a cash business and it is impossible to verify the results, so you needed to have trust. If you and I were on the same team and I gave you a $100,000 to go play with and you reported that you lost it, I would just have to take your word for it. In the short run, that is a very feasible outcome. I can’t really think of another business like that,” he said.

Ma fi t in well with the tight-knit team, according to Aponte, and he said he doesn’t mind that Ma has parlayed the experience into a book and a movie. “To be honest, when the book fi rst came out, it did bother me in the sense that it was written from one person’s perspective when there were a lot of other key guys who were involved and were very instrumental. Jeff came on after we had already been successful as a team.”

“It just didn’t seem like the key guys were getting their due. Over time I’ve realized that the book has been a big positive for everyone, even for those who weren’t offi cially signed on for the book,” he said.

Despite not having as much input on the movie, it is obvious that the fact is considerably more interesting than the fi ction. Aponte is quick to talk about how the core group of players loved to risk ridiculous amounts of money in one shot, having personally played three $10,000-limit hands at once. “We loved playing blackjack and betting big money. You have to bet big to win big and beat a casino. No matter how long you play, when the count gets high and you bet big money, you still get an adrenaline rush. It is defi nitely a great feeling.”

Aponte said he constantly capitalized on his abilities to be a successful big player, but that other team members didn’t fare nearly as well when put to the test. “The big players just had to have street smarts. They had to be very observant of what is going on without looking like they are paying attention. You have to be able to multitask, doing the mathematical mechanics, interacting with other people, and keeping an eye on your surroundings because things could hit the fan very quickly.”

Being aware of his surroundings wasn’t the only attribute a player needed. “You also had to be able to handle the pressure and be comfortable being in the spotlight. When you are betting a lot of money, you get a lot of attention from everyone. You get treated differently. We did have some players that we had high hopes for, but it didn’t work out. Mathematically, they were great, but the pressure of actually putting out the money was too big for them,” he said.

In addition to loving the fi nancial, social, and mathematical aspects of team play, Aponte credits the rebellious nature of the team as one of the biggest factors for participating for so long. “For me, it certainly was appealing. Growing up, I was always on the academic track, but I always knew I wouldn’t have a typical 9 to 5 job. I had no idea what I was going to end up doing. I ended up taking a lot of pride in the fact that what we were doing was professional and unconventional.”

After a successful career fooling the casinos, Aponte was forced to retire from professional play because many of the world’s casinos banned him from the fl oor. “It really wasn’t my choice. Even at its peak, I knew that it wasn’t going to last forever. The casinos fi nally started to catch on because of how much we were winning, so our original core group of big players from the beginning couldn’t play anymore. It was really diffi cult to train players to fi ll those spots and, like with a lot of things in life, I think a bunch of us got to the point where we just wanted to move on,” he said.

No longer a threat to show up and bust a casino in person, Aponte has now learned several things about casino tactics that he never thought would have been possible in his previous life as a card counter. “It was really interesting because I heard the Grif- fi n Agency’s perspective of what was going on from the casino’s side. They pointed out that the casinos were really slow to catch on and it was because of our success that they had to make changes.