Which is — according to the film Adrian and I were watching, tonight — a catch-phrase used by some casino croupiers when there’s a big winner at the Blackjack tables.
And Blackjack is the McGuffin for “21”, the Robert Luketic, Kevin Spacey produced film that had the pair of us were watching, tonight. And — appropriately — it’s a bit of a hacker movie!!
“21” is the true (for a given value of true) story of a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology* who are persuaded by one of their lecturers, played by Kevin Spacey, that playing Blackjack, for money, isn’t the mug’s game that they’d assumed.
As long as you’re using a technique called card-counting, that is …
The basics of that are simple; you assign a value to high cards, and another to low cards, in order to keep track of when high cards are more likely to appear. In blackjack, that’s when you start betting heavily, as you’re more likely to get 10-valued cards and aces.
It follows Ben Campbell from when he gets involved with Spacey’s team of card counters; one that’s initially successful, but becomes more and more undisciplined and agitated, as the pressure — and winnings — mount. Actually, part of that pressure is provided by Lawrence Fishburne as Cole Williams, the eupemistically titled Loss Prevention Officer for the Vegas casinos.
I leave you to fill in those details, yourself; but Fishburne’s character does have a serious amount of blinged out knuckles.
Very dusty knuckles, I should add.
It’s fascinating stuff to watch. And based on a premise the basics of which, much like Fermat’s Last Theorem, very simple to understand. The other part of the attraction? We like all like to think that there’s something simple we can do to take on the Establishment at their own game and win!
Which is a tempting but futile thing, in all probability. After all, casino’s are very ruthless businesses. And for those of us with any kind of addiction issue, hanging around a casino —organised by people who’ve picked up hints from the recreational pharmaceutical industry — is necessarily a good way to find out if you HAVEN’T got a gambling problem.
But, my word, isn’t it still tempting?
* The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is where the word ‘hacker’, in the sense of a computer hacker, originally evolved. They used to the word to mean someone who did a good hack; found a way to solve a problem, or exploited a flaw to do something entertaining and unexpected. Card counting, I’m thinking, is a good example. The
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