The #1 national bestseller, now a major motion picture, 21—the amazing inside story about a gambling ring of M.I.T. students who beat the system in Vegas—and lived to tell how. Robin Hood meets the Rat Pack when the best and the brightest of M.I.T.’s math students and engineers take up blackjack under the guidance of an eccentric mastermind. Their small blackjack club develops from an experiment in counting cards on M.I.T.’s campus into a ring of card savants with a system for playing large and winning big. In less than two years they take some of the world’s most sophisticated casinos for more than three million dollars. But their success also brings with it the formidable ire of casino owners and launches them into the seedy underworld of corporate Vegas with its private investigators and other violent heavies.

He played in casinos around the world with a plan to make himself richer than anyone could possibly imagine -- but it would nearly cost him his life. Semyon Dukach was known as the Darling of Las Vegas. A legend at age twenty-one, this cocky hotshot was the biggest high roller to appear in Sin City in decades, a mathematical genius with a system the casinos had never seen before and couldn't stop — a system that has never been revealed until now; that has nothing to do with card counting, wasn't illegal, and was more powerful than anything that had been tried before. Las Vegas. Atlantic City. Aruba. Barcelona. London. And the jewel of the gambling crown — Monte Carlo. Dukach and his fellow MIT students hit them all and made millions. They came in hard, with stacks of cash; big, seemingly insane bets; women hanging on their arms; and fake identities. Although they were taking classes and studying for exams during the week, over the weekends they stormed the blackjack tables only to be harassed, banned from casinos, threatened at gunpoint, and beaten in Vegas's notorious back rooms. The stakes were high, the dangers very real, but the players were up to the challenges, consequences be damned. There was Semyon Dukach himself, bored with school and broke; Victor Cassius, the slick, brilliant MIT grad student who galvanized the team; Owen Keller, with stunning ability but a dark past that would catch up to him; and Allie Simpson, bright, clever, and a feast for the eyes. In the classroom, they were geeks. On the casino floor, they were unstoppable. Busting Vega$ is Dukach's unbelievably true story; a riveting account of monumental greed, excess, hubris, sex, love, violence, fear, and statistics that is high-stakes entertainment at its best.

For nearly five years, he was known as the 'Darling Of Las Vegas'; the biggest high roller to hit Sin City in decades, a hotshot, twenty one year-old kid with a seemingly unlimited bankroll and an even more unlimited lust for big money action. His name was Semyon Dukatch, and stories swirled in his wake. Some said he was a Russian arms dealer, others a pop star from Eastern Europe. But the truth was even more unlikely: he was a twenty-one year old graduate student who had a plan that would one day make him richer than anyone could possibly imagine. The Darling of Las Vegas quickly became a legend in the casino world. He is the only person banned from the island of Aruba. He was held, at gunpoint, in a cave in Monte Carlo and told that if he ever returned, he'd be murdered. And he made millions of dollars playing blackjack, using three simple techniques that gave him the edge, techniques that are revealed in this book for the first time. This is his story, the ultimate true story of Las Vegas, the book Vegas doesn't want you to read...

Punk-rock SF! Nuclear terrorists, a political kidnapping, and a giant woman from the fourth dimension. Say goodbye to the old world. This literary tour de force explores the landscape of the higher dimensions with the humor and vigor of an underground cartoon. At the same time, it manages to be a heartfelt and realistic depiction of a contemporary marriage.

Real-life all too rarely offers stories that are quite as satisfying as fiction. Bringing Down the House is one of the exceptions. Cheating in casinos is illegal; card-counting - making a record of what cards have so far been dealt to enable the player to make some prediction of what cards remain in the deck - is not. But casinos understandably dislike the practice and make every effort to keep card-counters out of their premises. Bringing Down the House tells the true story of the most successful scam ever, in which teams of brilliant young mathematicians and physicists won millions of dollars from the casinos of Las Vegas, being drawn in the process into the high-life of drugs, high-spending and sex. Bringing Down the House is as readable and as fascinating as Liar's Poker or Barbarians At the Gate, an insight into a closed, excessive and utterly corrupt world.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House—the sources for the film The Social Network and 21—comes the larger-than-life rags-to-riches tale of a group of University of Montana frat brothers who turned a weekly poker game in the basement of a local dive bar into AbsolutePoker.com, one of the largest online companies in the world. Based on extensive insider interviews and participation, Straight Flush tells of the company’s initial operations in the exotic jungle paradise of Costa Rica—where its founders embraced an outrageous lifestyle of girls, parties, and money—and of the gray area of U.S. and international law in which they created an industry. Soon, the U.S. Department of Justice was gunning for them… Should they fold—or double down and ride their hot hand? Impossible to put down, Straight Flush is an exclusive, never-before-seen look behind the headlines of one of the wildest business stories of the past decade.

Author Nathaniel Tilton was just a regular guy with a regular job when he read Bringing Down the House and decided he wanted to do what the players in that book did. A journey through the inner world of card counting, the lessons of teamwork, and the clandestine pursuit of beating the odds, in The Blackjack Life Tilton relates the story of his personal journey through the smoke-filled casinos in which he and his playing partner gambled, to the seedy backrooms that he hoped he would never see. More than just wins and losses, The Blackjack Life is about the growth of a man who discovered himself through the unlikeliest of places – the world of professional blackjack -- and who now shares his informed view of the opportunities that still exist for skilled players and what it’s really like to travel that road today.