Busting Vegas

    This book, Busting Vegas, is a sort of unintended sequel — it’s about just a few people from MIT that, instead of developing card counting techniques, decided instead to do some observational tricks to tilt the odds into their favor a lot. The book follows these half dozen folks from MIT to Las Vegas to Atlantic City to Aruba to Monte Carlo, and talks about how they did what they did.

    I was reading the epilogue, written by one of the principals, and he talked a bit about how folks would wonder why he was willing to share his techniques in detail — and he said he was lately watching the open source movement in software — particularly Firefox’s gains against Microsoft — and incredibly encouraged. So he figured he’d do the same sort of thing to bring down the casinos. Amazing, I thought.

    Fun book to read — ultimately, it reads a lot like his first book about MIT nerds breaking the casinos, but is fun nonetheless.