- Hardcover: 304 pages
- Publisher: William Morrow & Company; First Edition edition (Oct 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0060575115
- ISBN-13: 978-0060575113
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 16 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,213,962 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Way too much velvet for three in the afternoon. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
Having read Mezrich's Bringing Down the House earlier, Busting Vegas was a book to read. If you liked BDtH you will enjoy this read as well. Though be warned, that it itreates around same type of events and characters. Thus if you are expecting something really new, you might be disappointed. Sort of a sequel feeling may be a bit disappointing, but the book is enjoyable read anyway.
Format:Paperback
Once I started reading it I couldn't put it down... reading it on the train, bus, and anywhere I had some free time!
The story hooks you right from the beginning, and sometimes the action gets to such a level that I had trouble believing that it is a true story.
A must read for anyone fascinated by the world of blackjack, card counting, and how to beat the casinos.
The story hooks you right from the beginning, and sometimes the action gets to such a level that I had trouble believing that it is a true story.
A must read for anyone fascinated by the world of blackjack, card counting, and how to beat the casinos.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
69 reviews
33 of 37 people found the following review helpful
The thrilling read you would expect from a Mezrich book
7 Dec 2005
Format:Hardcover
Mezrich broke onto the bestseller list with his account of an MIT blackjack uber-card counting team that hit Vegas for big money (in 2003's Bringing Down the House). Now he's back with a another MIT-whiz kid blackjack scam, only this one is even more unbelievable and over-the-top. People have heard of the card counters discussed in Mezrich's first book, but the three types of play desribed in Busting Vegas are going to be brand-new to most readers. So new, in fact, that they may seem unbelievable.
These blackjack techniques (or scams, depending on your point of view) involve as much math as they do shuffle-watching and precise card-cutting. It's a marriage of the intense math required for card counting and the near-impossible perfect moves required in a roulette or craps scam. Complete control of an entire table by the team is required, so that a known card can be directed to hit on the appropriate hand. No random players can be sitting at the table taking cards out of the shuffle.
As with the other MIT scam, the players have to take on fake identities. In this scam, however, it is essential that everyone be a big roller, a "whale." Just watching the insane Russian arms dealer, trust-fund brat, and European rock star characters these guys take around the Strip is entertaining.
Is Mezrich's account to be taken as the literal truth? Of course not! Names have been changed and the story has been spiced up to read like a Grisham novel. Semyon Dukatch himself has said that the story captures the "essense" of his experience. This isn't meant to be 100% truth, and it would probably be a heck of a lot more dry reading if someone had told every literal fact from start to finish. Mezrich's cinematic style, full of highs and lows for the characters, makes for compelling reading.
Enjoy this as a great novel about whiz kids beating the establishment of the casinos (for a short while), and don't worry too much about where the line between fact and fiction is.
These blackjack techniques (or scams, depending on your point of view) involve as much math as they do shuffle-watching and precise card-cutting. It's a marriage of the intense math required for card counting and the near-impossible perfect moves required in a roulette or craps scam. Complete control of an entire table by the team is required, so that a known card can be directed to hit on the appropriate hand. No random players can be sitting at the table taking cards out of the shuffle.
As with the other MIT scam, the players have to take on fake identities. In this scam, however, it is essential that everyone be a big roller, a "whale." Just watching the insane Russian arms dealer, trust-fund brat, and European rock star characters these guys take around the Strip is entertaining.
Is Mezrich's account to be taken as the literal truth? Of course not! Names have been changed and the story has been spiced up to read like a Grisham novel. Semyon Dukatch himself has said that the story captures the "essense" of his experience. This isn't meant to be 100% truth, and it would probably be a heck of a lot more dry reading if someone had told every literal fact from start to finish. Mezrich's cinematic style, full of highs and lows for the characters, makes for compelling reading.
Enjoy this as a great novel about whiz kids beating the establishment of the casinos (for a short while), and don't worry too much about where the line between fact and fiction is.
25 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Not playing with a full deck
1 April 2006
Format:Hardcover
One would like to believe that a group of MIT students truly did take Vegas for millions as Ben Mezrich claims. But in a era when diarists and autobiographers are routinely getting caught in lies, it's very difficult to believe this story. First, it reads like a bad pulp novel, filled with every possible B-movie cliche--security room beatings, casino owners waving guns in their faces on Aruban golf courses, swarthy Europeans threatening to kill them if they ever come back to Monte Carlo. Mix in a cast of characters straight out of central casting--the Russian math genius, the bombshell blond, the screwup with a drug problem, the obese nerd, and the charismatic mystery "leader" who hides hundreds of thousands of dollars in laundry baskets all over the greater Boston area. Then add sexual misunderstandings and B-movie "dialogue," and the author's own self-indulgent "visits" to Vegas brothels and casinos to "retrace" the kids' journey, and you get a far-fetched potboiler seemingly untethered to verifiable facts. Why, for example, did Mezrich not interview the kids' nemesis, a Vegas private eye who follows their movements and foils their plans everywhere they go? Why are there no interviews with security guards and casino managers who roughed them up in Vegas, Aruba, and Monte Carlo? How do we can believe that any of these people even existed, and that any of this is true, when Mezrich swallows their tale hook line and sinker? Read this entertaining but ultimally vacuous trifle for what it is--all bluff and fluff.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Clever, but terribly written
25 Jun 2007
Format:Hardcover
This is a fun little summer read. Smarty-pants MIT geeks figure out some ways to count cards in blackjack, and win it all! Then, of course, it all comes crashing down! The clever methods turn out to be more or less brute force: count and commit stuff to memory, then time your bets just right. I guess I was hoping for something more MIT-worthy.
Unfortunately, this book is so badly-written it's almost unbearable to read. I wasn't expecting great non-fiction, but this is *bad*. Here's an example: describing a "grueling" month of training the team goes through before hitting Vegas, we're told that the students made "biweekly" trips to a local casino. Really? Two whole trips isn't exactly "grueling" training. (Maybe the author meant "twice weekly"?) This is followed by "every ten days, the team endured 'checkouts'"--basically pop quizzes. Every *ten* days? So...that makes three times during this so-called intense month? This doesn't exactly paint a picture of the team grinding away in Boston in preparation for the big score, it sounds kinda like some kids playing cards every once in a while.
The whole book can't seem to strike the right tone of reality. This *is* a true story, but it isn't told straight. Details are needlessly specific (how many books on a bookcase, the color of a pair of shoes, how good a cup of tea is, and so on). But these are details that aren't just irrelevant to the story, but impossible to recall. It's clear that the author is simply filling in information here in hopes that it all seems more "real". Problem is, it's not possible to tell when these details *are* real, and so everything seems equally fake, and you end up wondering: when Owen was in that secret back room at the casino, did he really get beat up and handcuffed? Did the security team really threaten him like that? Or are those details just imagined, too? If this was pure fiction, it'd be ok, but in a supposedly non-fiction book, it feels mostly made-up.
Unfortunately, this book is so badly-written it's almost unbearable to read. I wasn't expecting great non-fiction, but this is *bad*. Here's an example: describing a "grueling" month of training the team goes through before hitting Vegas, we're told that the students made "biweekly" trips to a local casino. Really? Two whole trips isn't exactly "grueling" training. (Maybe the author meant "twice weekly"?) This is followed by "every ten days, the team endured 'checkouts'"--basically pop quizzes. Every *ten* days? So...that makes three times during this so-called intense month? This doesn't exactly paint a picture of the team grinding away in Boston in preparation for the big score, it sounds kinda like some kids playing cards every once in a while.
The whole book can't seem to strike the right tone of reality. This *is* a true story, but it isn't told straight. Details are needlessly specific (how many books on a bookcase, the color of a pair of shoes, how good a cup of tea is, and so on). But these are details that aren't just irrelevant to the story, but impossible to recall. It's clear that the author is simply filling in information here in hopes that it all seems more "real". Problem is, it's not possible to tell when these details *are* real, and so everything seems equally fake, and you end up wondering: when Owen was in that secret back room at the casino, did he really get beat up and handcuffed? Did the security team really threaten him like that? Or are those details just imagined, too? If this was pure fiction, it'd be ok, but in a supposedly non-fiction book, it feels mostly made-up.
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