MIT students beat Vegas at blackjack
Interesting story: "throughout the 1990s," a rotating group of MIT students took regular trips to Vegas, where they used expert card-counting strategies to win millions at blackjack.
They used fake identities and were given great free perks (I wanted to spell that "perqs," as it's short for "perquisites," but the dictionary stopped me), such as gigantic rooms with private pools and butlers. Eventually the casinos figured out who they were and barred them from the games.
But the most interesting part to me comes at the very end of the article: turns out one of them wrote a book about it, and MGM is planning to make a movie out of the book. MGM also owns casinos that lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to these players. Which at first I thought was ironic 'cause it meant MGM giving even more money to them. But the final paragraph of the article notes:
Turn a loss of hundreds of thousands [on MGM's part] into potential millions from a movie about it. One is tempted to say that the old adage is true after all—the house always wins.
Heh. Good point; I hadn't thought of it that way.