A group of MIT students used mathematics to beat Las Vegas casinos for $57 MILLION. They did it for a decade. They never cheated – In the 1990s a Harvard Business School graduate named Bill Kaplan assembled a team of MIT students with one goal beat blackjack using pure math. – The team had three roles. Spotters who sat at tables counting cards without betting. Gorillas who jumped in when the count turned favourable. Big players who placed enormous bets only when the odds were tilted in their favour. – They used hand signals and code words to communicate across crowded casino floors without ever speaking to each other. – They trained for months in a Boston warehouse before their first trip to Las Vegas. – On their first real weekend they won over $100,000. – At their peak they were walking onto casino floors carrying $800,000 in cash in backpacks. – Over a decade they took an estimated $57 million from casinos across Las Vegas Atlantic City and Europe. – One team member posed as a Texas oil heir. Another as a high rolling Korean businessman. – Casinos started sharing their photographs across a private network and pulling them into back rooms one by one. – They never cheated, never broke a single law. The casinos changed their rules specifically because of them. – Ben Mezrich wrote a book about them called Bringing Down the House which sold over a million copies. – Hollywood turned it into the 2008 film 21 starring Kevin Spacey and Jim Sturgess. They just understood the mathematics of the game better than the people running it. You cannot ban someone for being too good at counting.