Jeff Haney counts cards with two MIT’s alumni who beat Vegas

By Jeff Haney

Monday, Oct. 30, 2006 | 7:30 a.m.

Even now, 10 years later, Dave Irvine still gets a charge out of arriving in Las Vegas.

"It's such an alive city," Irvine said. "Every time I look out the window of the airplane and see the Strip, especially at night, it brings back so many memories."

Even for a city that draws 40 million tourists a year, Irvine has to rank among its most notorious visitors.

He was a member of the team of MIT students who used sophisticated blackjack card-counting techniques to extract millions of dollars from Las Vegas casinos in the mid-1990s.

Their exploits were chronicled in "Bringing Down the House," a 2002 bestseller that immortalized the MIT team - even if the author did help himself to a heaping plate of artistic license.

Hearing Irvine tell an unadorned version of the tale, downplaying its sensationalistic side, it somehow becomes even more impressive.

"We saw it as a job," Irvine said Saturday. "We paid our dues. We were always very focused on our training. To us, it was work.

"We didn't spend our time partying or going to nightclubs - well, at least most of the time we didn't."

Over a burger at a Las Vegas casino resort where he was once "hard barred" during his blackjack heyday, Irvine recounted how his team ran an initial bankroll of $200,000 up to $2 million in less than 10 months.

("Hard barred," when casino officials decide they've had enough of your blackjack action, entails a not-so-friendly escort to the parking garage and then off the property. "Soft barred" is when they say, "No more blackjack for you, sir, but feel free to try your luck at the roulette wheel.")

The team's rally was highlighted by a Super Bowl Sunday score of half a million dollars, Irvine said. As he remembers, it would have been the 1995 game, when the 49ers beat the Chargers, 49-26.

"That was one night we broke the no-partying rule," Irvine said.

Irvine and Mike Aponte, former manager of the MIT team, were in Las Vegas to film a segment on card counting for a German TV network.

Both acknowledge the influence of their blackjack forebears on the MIT team's success - especially legendary counter Ken Uston, who brought national attention to blackjack team play with a series of books and TV appearances in the 1970s.

One of Uston's strategies, adopted by the MIT team, involves signaling a so-called "big player" to join the table and make large bets when the count indicates the remaining cards are favorable.

"We didn't reinvent the wheel," Irvine said. "Card counting has been around since the '60s. But we did do it on a huge scale. The fact that we were MIT students, for whatever reason, people were interested in that and we found some publicity."

Aponte and Irvine, who owns an engineering company in Florida, run the instructional Blackjack Institute (blackjackinstitute.com) as a side business.

Relegating hyperbole to the discard rack, Irvine said he hopes to educate average players trying to carve out a small edge against - not necessarily bring down - the house.

Irvine's MIT teammate John Chan was also in town Saturday night, showing off his counting skills at Viktor Nacht's Halloween Blackjack Ball at a hotel off the Strip.

Nacht, proprietor of Henderson's RGE Publishing, promotes the party as an opportunity for blackjack players to don costumes, exchange tips of the trade and test their gambling acumen.

By some fluke, Chan was ousted by a lowly amateur in a contest that involved memorizing sequences of cards as they were dealt. (Full disclosure: I was actually trying. I'm sure Chan approached the competition with the kind of intensity Garry Kasparov would bring to a six-game match of Hungry Hungry Hippos.)

Oddly enough, one test question at the blackjack ball asked participants to identify the year of Ken Uston's death.

Uston died in 1987.

He's gone, but on a Halloween weekend in Las Vegas that was crawling with card counters, not forgotten.