New Episode: Blackjack Legacy

Jeff Ma talks about his time with the MIT team, and also his life as an entrepreneur.

When I started the podcast I had some ideas for the kinds of episodes that I wanted to make, but no idea whether I’d ever be able to make them.

One idea that was sort of obvious was to talk to the real people behind well known pop culture depictions of gambling. Last year I got to do the episode titled “The Mayfair Revisited” which was about the actual poker players that played in the club made famous by Rounders.

This episode is about Jeff Ma, who is the actual MIT card counter that inspired the book “Bringing Down the House” and the movie “21.”

There is an interesting challenge in doing this kind of episode because you don’t really want to go scene by scene through the movie and ask “Did this really happen?”

That borders on a Chris Farley Show approach.

In this case the job was made easier because in addition to his time playing blackjack, Jeff has also had a life as an entrepreneur which is interesting. So I asked him some questions about blackjack, and some about his career working in tech.

The episode got its title because I have heard advantage players cite the movie as the thing that got them into card counting. Actually, in the episode “Greetings from Las Vegas” Zack White said that “Bringing Down the House” was one of the inspirations for the gambling team at Appalachian State.

There are always clips that I like, but which don’t make it into the episode for reasons of running time or flow of the episode. Below I’ve embedded a clip of Jeff talking about playing craps. I had heard him mention on his podcast that even going back to his time on the MIT team, he would sometimes play craps. Just as a clarification, Jeff is not saying that he played craps with an advantage. He is saying that he played for small stakes relative to the amount they were winning at blackjack.

Jeff Ma - Playing Craps as a Team Game

The next release will be the fully compiled episode featuring Marc Cohodes talking about SBF, FTX, and Silvergate.

Here are links to the Blackjack Legacy episode.