Bringing Down the House

Author: Ben Mezrich
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743250842
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
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.

Bringing Down the House

Author: Ben Mezrich
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099468239
Category : Cardsharping
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
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. This book tells the true story a successful scam, in which teams of young mathematicians and physicists won millions of dollars from the casinos of Las Vegas.

The House Advantage

Author: Jeffrey Ma
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 0230109683
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
As part of the notorious MIT Team depicted in Ben Mezrich's now classic Bringing Down the House, Jeff Ma used math and statistics to master the game of blackjack and reap handsome rewards at casinos. Years later, Ma has inspired not only a bestselling novel and hit movie, but has also started three different companies—the latest of which, Citizen Sports, is an innovative marriage of sports, betting, and digital technology—and launched a successful corporate speaking career. The House Advantage reveals Ma's cutting-edge mathematical insights into the world of statistics and makes them applicable to a wide business audience. He argues that numbers are the key to analyzing nearly everything in the world of business, from how to spot and profit from global market inefficiencies to having multiple backup plans in anticipation of every probability. Ma's stories and business lessons are as intriguing as they are universally applicable.

Baby Clown

Author: Kara LaReau
Publisher: Candlewick
ISBN: 0763697435
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 33

Book Description
An award-winning author and a Caldecott Medalist introduce an adorable new circus star — who won’t stop wailing! When Frieda and Boffo Clown have a baby, everyone in the circus is over the moon. But there is just one problem: Baby Clown won’t stop crying! Frieda and Boffo try everything: putting on their silliest faces, driving him around in their tiny car. They even try taking off his red nose and big shoes. But that just makes Baby Clown cry more. Can Frieda and Boffo turn his little clown frown upside down in time for the sold-out show? Kara LaReau deftly juggles wit and warmth in this hilarious nod to parental persistence, while Matthew Cordell’s big-top-bright illustrations bring Baby Clown and his circus family to humorously frazzled life. Older siblings, in particular, will step right up to this applause-worthy picture book, joining Baby Clown in many a heartfelt “WAAAAH!”

Bringing Down the Duke

Author: Evie Dunmore
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 198480569X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
“Dunmore is my new find in historical romance. Her A League of Extraordinary Women series is, well, extraordinary.”—Julia Quinn, #1 New York Times bestselling author “With her sterling debut, Evie Dunmore dives into a fresh new space in historical romance that hits all the right notes.”—Entertainment Weekly A stunning debut for author Evie Dunmore and her Oxford suffragists in which a fiercely independent vicar's daughter takes on a powerful duke in a fiery love story that threatens to upend the British social order. England, 1879. Annabelle Archer, the brilliant but destitute daughter of a country vicar, has earned herself a place among the first cohort of female students at the renowned University of Oxford. In return for her scholarship, she must support the rising women's suffrage movement. Her charge: recruit men of influence to champion their cause. Her target: Sebastian Devereux, the cold and calculating Duke of Montgomery who steers Britain's politics at the Queen's command. Her challenge: not to give in to the powerful attraction she can't deny for the man who opposes everything she stands for. Sebastian is appalled to find a suffragist squad has infiltrated his ducal home, but the real threat is his impossible feelings for green-eyed beauty Annabelle. He is looking for a wife of equal standing to secure the legacy he has worked so hard to rebuild, not an outspoken commoner who could never be his duchess. But he wouldn't be the greatest strategist of the Kingdom if he couldn't claim this alluring bluestocking without the promise of a ring...or could he? Locked in a battle with rising passion and a will matching her own, Annabelle will learn just what it takes to topple a duke.... “There is nothing quite so satisfying as seeing such a man brought to his knees by a beautiful woman with nothing to her name except an inviolable sense of her own self-worth.”—NPR

Bringing Down the Mouse

Author: Ben Mezrich
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1442496320
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Charlie Lewis goes on a roller coaster ride of risk, math, and gaming in this middle grade novel that parallels the New York Times bestselling Bringing Down the House, which inspired the movie 21. Charlie Lewis is a nerd. All he’s ever been good at is math—and he’s really good at math. So good that he’s recruited by a group of kids determined to game the system at the biggest theme park in the world—and win the grand prize. Soon Charlie is caught up in the excitement and thrill of using his math skills for awesomeness…but what’s at stake may be more than he’s willing to risk. How far will Charlie go for a chance at the ultimate reward?

Busting Vegas

Author: Ben Mezrich
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061739804
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
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.

Burning Down the House

Author: Nell Bernstein
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1595589562
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
When teenagers scuffle during a basketball game, they are typically benched. But when Will got into it on the court, he and his rival were sprayed in the face at close range by a chemical similar to Mace, denied a shower for twenty-four hours, and then locked in solitary confinement for a month. One in three American children will be arrested by the time they are twenty-three, and many will spend time locked inside horrific detention centers that defy everything we know about how to rehabilitate young offenders. In a clear-eyed indictment of the juvenile justice system run amok, award-winning journalist Nell Bernstein shows that there is no right way to lock up a child. The very act of isolation denies delinquent children the thing that is most essential to their growth and rehabilitation: positive relationships with caring adults. Bernstein introduces us to youth across the nation who have suffered violence and psychological torture at the hands of the state. She presents these youths all as fully realized people, not victims. As they describe in their own voices their fight to maintain their humanity and protect their individuality in environments that would deny both, these young people offer a hopeful alternative to the doomed effort to reform a system that should only be dismantled. Burning Down the House is a clarion call to shut down our nation’s brutal and counterproductive juvenile prisons and bring our children home.

Memoirs of a False Messiah

Author: Pamela Becker
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN: 9781799019558
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
Her name is MiMi. And she is convinced it's her God-given mission to abandon middle-class America and create a commune for like-minded women in the desert in Israel. Told in MiMi's voice, she describes her special relationship with God as she moves from the mixed-religion home of her early childhood to Orthodox Judaism in her teens, to the establishment and development of her cult. MiMi looks to the women in her life, in the Bible, and in other ancient texts, weaving modern and biblical dilemmas, as she shapes a truly unique place for her followers and herself. When her life and utopian community grow more turbulent and even violent, she questions her mission. Deeply affecting, Memoirs of a False Messiah is the richly told story of one woman's struggle to reach perfection in an imperfect world.

Bringing Down the Colonel

Author: Patricia Miller
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
ISBN: 0374252661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

Book Description
"The story of the 1890s scandal in which a young woman named Madeline Pollard sued congressman William Campbell Preston Breckenridge for breach of promise. Pollard won the suit, and the mystery of who helped her pay the extravagant legal expenses in order to bring Breckinridge down illuminates a shift in the sexual politics of the Victorian era"--