John’s Blog

I read “Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions” (Ben Mezrich)

maybe a couple of years ago when it first came out — it’s the story of the MIT Blackjack Club, and how they developed team card counting techniques. Really fun read — only took a day to read and was interesting to read about what they were up to, how they ran into some (bad) trouble, etc.

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.

I’ve been reading this book over the past 6 weeks or so — although it’s not a long book, it’s just a little specific historically, and with the whole baby thing, it’s taken some time. What a great title, though!

The story is about the relationship between Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick — the two men who really build Carnegie Steel into a behemoth of a company — and really the beginning of the age of titans here in the United States. Pretty fascinating history, about a time (late 1800s), region (Pittsburgh & surrounds), and industry (steel) that I don’t know a ton about. The book centers around the Homestead works — a very productive steel mill near Pittsburgh — and a labor conflict that left several dead, set labor relations in America back probably 40 years, and has echoes even to the current day. As you might surmise from the title, the once cordial relationship between the 2 men didn’t end up all that amicably.

Anyway, a good book, but probably of somewhat limited interest — only really for folks who are wondering about that era (leading up to the creation of US Steel by JP Morgan and others) or why everything in sight in higher education is named after Carnegie.