I don't write up book very often, first because I don't read as much as I'd like, and second because I don't often have anything intelligent to say about the books I do read. But why should I let that stop me now. I just read Busting Vegas: The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees by Ben Mezrich. I enjoyed it, but I would have enjoyed it more if it weren't the exact same book as Mezrich's earlier Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. The storylines are almost identical: a team of super-smart MIT students develop strategies which allow them to win big at blackjack, until the big bad casinos shut them down. Unfortunately the characters in Busting Vegas are less sympathetic than their counterparts in Bringing Down the House, for me at least, for a couple of reasons. First of all, just the simple fact that the stories are so similar and I read Bringing Down the House first.
Second, the Bringing team were card counters, a legal technique which the casinos ban simply because it's too effective. The Busting team, despite their protestations to the contrary, were cheaters. They called it a "grey area" but their techniques were based on manipulating the outcome of the game: tricking the dealer into revealing the bottom (hole) card, and then forcing that card to be dealt at a time that was good for them. That's cheating.
I don't much like cheating, though I suppose cheating a massive casino isn't a cardinal sin. Not as bad as cheating your friends, or at least easier to rationalize. But they weren't just cheaters, they were stupid cheaters. The team in Bringing Down the House put a lot of work into camoflaging their behavior, but the people in Busting Vegas acted really, really obvious. They would walk into a casino, take up a whole table, make it clear they knew each other, place the minimum bet on every hand, then suddenly all six raise their bets by a factor of 10, and what do you know? The dealer busts, they all win. Then repeat the whole process at the same table -- minimum bets, suddenly all raise, all win -- and then act surprised when the casino catches on.
I think it would have been better if the author had any distance at all from the subjects. There's no rational observer; he never steps outside of the characters' point of view to acknowledge when their behavior is foolish or their reasoning is flawed. Georg speculated over whether the author had to do that, in order to get the story, or whether he "drank the kool-aid," in other words he got so wrapped up in their story that he couldn't see it any way but theirs. I kept thinking how different the book would have been if it were an article in a journalistic magazine. (It was kind of a slim book, so I think for length it might also have worked better as a magazine article.)
The "infomercial" at the end also left a bad taste in my mouth: an afterword written by the main subject of the book, plugging his videos on how to cheat at blackjack. I was thinking, dude, you got caught immediately, roughed up, arrested and almost killed, and I'm supposed to pay you to find out how to do it? What in the what now? He really lost me when he compared his cheating techniques to the open source software movement. Because, you know, they're both taking on the man. Fight the power! I stopped reading at that point so I don't know what other heights of rhetorical excess the guy reached.
Checking Mezrich's Amazon page I see that he's also written Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions. He's an entertaining writer, and I hope he figures out how to write a different book at some point.
Post a comment