Subtitle: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
How depressing the gambling world is; breaks up marriages and friendships, relies on bribery drunkenness and threats, generates nothing.
I didn't like Mezrich's prose, either. It assumes that everyone finds the Vegas high-roller style both seductive and dangerously vulgar; it invites us to leer and sneer at once. 'Everyone' is narrow, since the perspective is so clearly from a decent Boston neighborhood and university. The view from this apex is blinkered: part Chinese—you could see it in his eyes, narrow drops of oil beneath a ridged brow
, p. 13; He looked like he owned at least one pickup truck.
, p. 166. Unfortunately, his writing wasn't even accidentally descriptive of his own world.
However, the closing essay by Kevin Lewis, one of the MIT students who pulled tremendous profits out of blackjack over three years' work, is fine. It is entirely about the general principles of card-counting; it presents the one equation it uses in clear, accurate prose; it spends a page on subtleties of application. With such a grasp of analysis and explication, it isn't surprising that Lewis navigated Vegas better than Mezrich did.
ISBN: 0743225708
So wrote clew in History (20th c.). | TrackBack