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Bringing Down the House
2003 · Film · 105 min
Directed by Adam Shankman
Uptight lawyer Peter Sanderson wants to dive back into dating after his divorce and has a hard time meeting the right women. He tries online dating and lucks out when he starts chatting with a fellow lawyer. The two agree to meet in the flesh, but the woman he meets — an escaped African-American convict named Charlene — is not what he expected. Peter is freaked out, but Charlene tries to convince him to take her case and prove her innocence. Along the way, she wreaks havoc on his middle-class life as he gets a lesson in learning to lighten up.
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4 comments on Hacker News
the big difference here, as a few others have pointed out, is that the guy who stole this chips is an outlaw pursued by the police and the casino is aware that these chips were stolen.
the laundering thing you described actually worked on a large scale for the MIT blackjack team (at least according to "bringing down the house"), but that's because the casino was unaware that these chips were illicit (it also helps, of course, that the MIT blackjack team members were operating within the law - there's a huge different between the casinos wanting to bar you and the feds wanting to arrest you, a fairly major point lost in the movie adaptation).
Excited to see it. I just hope the real life facts dont get in the way of my enjoyment. At this point, if they try to make Eduardo out to be the good guy, I'm probably going to walk out of it. In every report I've read about the early stages of that company, that guy sounds like a real douche-bag.
Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House was a good read, but it sounded very embellished / made up. I didn't trust it as a read of non-fiction. And the movie 21 was just a complete piece of crap.
However this movie is directed by the guy who did Fight Club, so I'm sure it'll be turn out (and be reviewed) pretty well
The Cliff-notes version is that in black jack you have a slight statistical advantage since you know what cards have already been played. If there are lots of face cards left in the deck, then the dealer has a higher chance of busting. It's too small for a single player to make much money consistently (just a couple % advantage), but the MIT guys would have several people ("spotters") playing small hands, watching for a deck with lots of high cards left. They would signal to the "Big Players" who would come in like they owned the place, play $10K per hand and make a killing on the hot deck. Then when the cards ran out and were reshuffled, the Big Player would split and look for another hot deck at another table. This way they could multiply the gain when they found a hot deck.
"Bringing Down the House" (the book the movie was based on) was one of the best of the 100 or so books I've read in the last year.
PS How cool is it that Kevin Spacey reads Wired?
I've read the book "Bringing down the house", really fascinating read. Definitely going to go to this movie!