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Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, Jim Sturgess

Damn my math teacher in high school. If I had known I could have used all those numbers and formulas to win my fantasy baseball league and gamble in Vegas - two things that really count in life - I would have done more than have been transfixed by the cheerleading outfit that some girl named Beth was wearing during class. Mathematics is the language of nature, but more importantly the language of sports, dice, cards, and roulette wheels. Learn to master those languages and surprisingly girls named Beth, Mary, and Susan will suddenly find you very interesting. The jock might get the girl in high school, but the nerd with the slide rule is introducing her as his new trophy wife five or six years later.

Casinos make money because the odds, in almost every game they offer, are stacked in their favor. Every gambler walks onto the floor thinking they are going to be a big winner, but in reality, they are only sheep being invited over to the wolf’s house to eat and discovering the only course served, is chops. There is only one game where the odds are in the gambler’s favor – blackjack. If you can count the cards, keep track in your head of the cards that have already been played, you can know what cards remain in the shoe, which can help you predict what is likely to be dealt next. While this skill has been practiced by degenerate gamblers for decades, it was not until the early 1990s that math nerds realized there was gold and hot chicks in them thar hills.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has produced some of the brightest mathematicians and engineers in the history of this country. In the early 1990s, six students formed a blackjack club. Not only did they understand the math involved in card counting, but they designed computer programs to help them beat the house. After a few months of practice and refining their strategies, these Einsteins hit Vegas and started to enjoy the high roller’s lifestyle. They partied with celebrities like Michael Jordan and Howard Stern, dated Playboy playmates and football cheerleaders, lounged in VIP hotel rooms, and took in $400,000 in one weekend alone. Working as a team, it is estimated that over the course of 6 years these whiz kids took in between $1 million to $5 million apiece. MIT students had been playing cards after school and talking about the mathematics of card counting for nearly two decades before these kids hit Vegas.

It was a former professor with bad teeth and even worse hygiene who saw the money just hanging off the trees waiting to be picked. Gathering together more than $1 million from mysterious sources, choosing the brightest students to be part of the crew, they started to hit Vegas, riverboat casinos in Louisiana and along the Mississippi, numerous Indian reservations, and even cruise ships and island resorts. These young men did not fit the stereotype of what a card counter looked like so they went unnoticed by the casinos. They worked out various hand signals and worked as teams to increase their odds and to avoid being noticed by security personal. This allowed them to camouflage the operation and only call in the player who made the big bets when the cards were in their favor. They even developed faux persona to pass unnoticed among the other gamblers. Because young white men with large bankrolls stood out, they used Asian students. Much of their success was due to casinos being used to seeing the children of Asian executives with a fist full of cash and little common sense. Girls who spent their week days in glasses and their nose in a book, squeezed into tight low-cut cocktail dresses and played the dumb bimbo with such success that pit bosses, out of pity and hopes for a phone number, often helped them play their hands. The whole time the young woman was counting the cards waiting to signal the ringer when conditions were right for him to swoop in. Some evenings, they would loose as much as $100,000, but they averaged between a 10 and 20 percent return every time they hit the tables. They took card counting to a whole new level even developing whole new mathematical theories they applied to the cards. It was not uncommon for them to walk out of the casino with suitcases filled with $950,000, or $20,000 in chips hidden in their pants, or $200,000 underneath their hats. Yet, their success, big mouths, and hubris bred imitators. Still, the MIT students averaged making $4,000,000 a year.

It took about two years for the casinos to catch on. The MIT students could thank the Griffin Detective Agency, which provided intelligence on cheaters for the casinos all across the world and maintained a face book for casinos to spot counters, for nailing them. Griffin agents not only cased big winners, finding out who they hung out with, and where they went after hitting it big, but they also data-mined phone numbers and other personal information. (The detectives caught one cheater by placing radioactive isotopes on certain cards, so that a hidden Geiger counter would tell him when the high cards came out of the shoe.) What brought the MIT kids down was their greed. Other teams had begun to imitate them. Some of these crews had as many as 100 members. Big winners became too commonplace for it to be simply luck.

Griffin noticed the repeated success of certain members and that other members of the team were either sitting at the table or standing in the crowd when these people won. After investigating these individuals, they found that they had a Cambridge address connection. They finally brought one of the kids in for questioning. Confronted with the evidence, and a bribe of $25,000, he turned on the rest of the team. At the same time, the tension of their high roller lifestyle began to tear apart the team. Griffin notified the IRS about the team members and the government took matters from there. In order to insure that such whiz kids never take the casinos like that again. Griffin gets the photos of every freshman attending schools like MIT. The original crew of MIT students is banned from every casino that Griffin provides assistance to. Gone is their riches and rock-n-roll lifestyle and that would have been the end of it, if Kevin Spacey had not read a Ben Mezrich’s book “Bringing Down The House” about these students.

Directed by Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde, Win A Date With Tad Hamilton), 21 focuses on the story of Ben Campbell and his being drawn into the club. (This character is based on the real life Jeff Ma, who graduated from MIT in 1994 and has since founded the fantasy sports company ProTrade and developed the principle of “moneyball,” using statistics and mathematics to predict the future success of big league players and draft choices. Teams like the Oakland A’s and Boston Red Sox have used these calculations in their management of their clubs.) Kevin Spacey plays the professor in charge of the team and Laurence Fishburne plays the gentleman whose job it is to catch these kids in the act. Of course, Hollywood felt the need to add a love story for Ben in the form of Kate Bosworth (This is the third time she appears in a film with Spacey. The others being Superman Returns and Beyond The Sea.) In places, the need for Hollywood drama, a good moral lesson, and needless comedy provided by a couple of Asian characters, takes away from the drama of the real life story, but this movie still works

The first day of math class in high school should begin with the teacher showing a picture of Bill Gates, then Bill Gates’ house, his hot wife, and how much money he has in his bank account, followed by the other nerds who have taken over our world, their hot wives and mistresses, their houses and toys, and the sports general managers, and coaches who employ mathematics in their sports. Why should you learn mathematics? With the internet and computers, the geeks now own the world, and to quote a Dire Straits’ song from my childhood, “Money for nothin' and your chicks for free.” I guarantee you every boy in the class will look at the pretty girls with names like Beth in the front row and suddenly develop a real interest in those boring numbers and symbols in their book and on the board upfront. I wish I would have.

Verdict: A Decent Retelling of Ben Mezrich’s book