Real Life 21 Card Counter Reveals Team Management Tips That Are No Gamble

Call it the blackjack jackpot.

For the second straight weekend in a row, the gambling flick, 21, loosely based on Ben Mezrich’s 2002 book, Bringing Down the House (CBS), about five card counting MIT geeks who take the Las Vegas blackjack tables for millions, was tops at the box office. The Sony Pictures’ (SNE) film starring Kevin Spacey, Jim Sturgess, and Kate Bosworth scored a cumulative $46.5 million in ticket sales to date. 

But before the movie and the book was Jeffrey Ma, MIT’s premiere card counter and the inspiration behind Bringing Down the House. In the 1990s, Ma—played by Sturgess in the film—mastered the art of card counting in six months and along with members from the MIT blackjack team, took Vegas by storm.

“They didn’t know we were card counting, so they just saw us as people who were betting hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Ma tells MainStreet. “I went from being this MIT student who had a hard time getting into an Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day, to this guy that could get into everywhere – limo service, two floor suites, VIP at every place.”

Ma pocketed between three and five million dollars during his seven year gambling stretch, and recently shared with MainStreet the key elements to his success (other than being a mathematical whiz).

The MIT blackjack team relied on an intricate system of signals and strategy when hitting the tables, so trust and teamwork counted big time. “We were dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, so if you hand someone a $100,000 and say, ‘Go to Vegas and win me some money,’ there has to be a high amount of trust there,” says Ma. “We were constantly relying on members of our team to be good at what they did, and be able to do their job properly.”

Establishing a strong team isn’t only essential for Vegas style take-downs. “I’ve worked at a bunch of different startups, and when you start small you do everything yourself. And, then you’ve got to hire people to come in, and if you don’t actually trust them to do their job effectively, you can’t be a successful organization.” Acknowledging the strength that comes in numbers is essential. “I can go in a casino myself and sure I can do everything myself, but what worked was having a lot of other people working with me, it made us a lot more powerful,” he says. Translate to the real world, and “I could start a company on my own, but if I bring other people to do other jobs, we could be a much more successful organization.”

Ma’s model may have been proven mathematically, but it still took resolve to stick with it after taking a major hit at the tables. “There was one weekend, where in two hands I lost $100,000 and I could’ve easily given up at that point,” says Ma. “But, I kept going because I believed in what we were doing and rather than being focused on the short-term results, I believed in the model and I ended up winning $70,000 for that weekend.” 

Ma hasn’t left his gambling past too far behind. In addition to selling the movie rights for 21, he is the co-founder of Protrade, a fantasy sports site that enables users to buy and trade players and teams on a virtual sports stock market.