Card sharks take Harvard to school

Students hear MIT grads who won big in Las Vegas

The rivalry between the two schools is legendary, but on Monday night, Harvard was more than willing to learn from MIT.

About 300 Harvard students, each holding a glossy deck of cards, filled the chairs and aisles of a dining hall to hear MIT graduate Dave Irvine recount stories from his days as a Las Vegas card shark in the early 1990s.

Irvine was one of several Massachusetts Institute of Technology students whose card-counting exploits are captured in the film "21," released last month and costarring Laurence Fishburne and Kevin Spacey.

The movie, based on Boston author Ben Mezrich's book, "Bringing Down the House," has once again thrust Irvine and his teammates into the media spotlight, and many of the former Vegas heavy hitters have used their experience to help them in business ventures.

After graduating from MIT in 1995 and starting an engineering consulting company, Irvine and former teammate Mike Aponte set up the Blackjack Institute, a company offering everything from instructional DVDs and casino tables to $7,000 private mentoring sessions to teach card-counting as a means of improving one's odds at blackjack.

The evening's other speaker, Newton resident Bill Kaplan, managed the MIT blackjack team between 1992 and 1994, and has since set up two companies, one in real estate and the other in database management, using principles he says he acquired while playing blackjack.

The seminar was designed to get students thinking about taking risks in business and beyond, but it also modeled a style of lightning-quick decision-making especially relevant to Harvard students, said sophomore Ami Nash, a member of the Harvard Undergraduate Women in Business group that organized the event.

"We have a week to pick our classes," she said. "We don't have to declare our concentrations until sophomore year. . . . We don't have to make a lot of fast decisions, and this was a good chance for people to learn how to do that."

As Kaplan and Irvine shared stories about their card-counting days, the crowd listened in awed silence.

The team spent extravagant and mentally taxing weekends in Las Vegas accumulating piles of poker chips and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, Irvine said, and then struggled to transport the money back to sparsely furnished student apartments in Cambridge.

"One time a team member left $125,000 in $100 bills in a brown paper bag in an MIT classroom overnight," Kaplan said.

"When we came back the next morning, the bag was gone."

With the involvement of State Police, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, and the FBI, the cash was eventually recovered, but not before attracting attention to the team.

After being told by police that the card players were under investigation, Kaplan told police about their trips to Las Vegas in an attempt to prove they were not doing anything illegal.

Irvine stressed that counting cards is a legal maneuver - "you're just looking at the cards" - explaining that memorizing all the dealt cards allows players to infer which are left in the deck.

The more high cards left in the deck, the better the player's odds of beating the dealer.

As the more dedicated members of the audience began taking notes, Irvine demonstrated the MIT team's technique of assigning high, low, and neutral values to different ranges of cards.

In an impromptu competition, Irvine asked the students to remove two cards face-down from the deck in front of them and deduce their value by counting up the rest of the deck, flipping through the cards one at a time.

"Don't cheat," he said, grinning at the roar of laughter that greeted his admonition. "This is serious."

While most found the exercise a challenge - brows furrowed as students tried to assign a value to each card - freshman Alexander Groeneveld signaled that he was finished after less than 30 seconds, winning a DVD documenting the team's exploits.

For Groeneveld, who hails from Australia, the evening brought him to the reason for his presence at Harvard in the first place.

As a high school student, he had seen a documentary about the MIT card counters and taught himself their technique.

"They're the reason I started looking at schools overseas and thought about going to MIT," he said, adding that he only applied to Harvard after figuring out its proximity to his original school of interest.

The rivalry between the universities went unnoted for most of the evening, but there were occasional digs at both schools.

As Kaplan, who attended both Harvard College and Harvard Business School, prepared to speak following the card-counting competition, he joked that Irvine had whispered to him that "MIT students learn this so much faster."