Everyone is entitled to get lucky sometimes. But there are those who seem to get way luckier, way more often, than the rest of us. While it often takes varying degrees of skill and timing to land a major casino win, you can’t discount the role that good fortune plays in all of it.
The recently opened Encore Boston Harbor casino is situated just 14 minutes away from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, home of the famous MIT blackjack team.
Figure out how to legally beat a casino game – whether it’s through the rather benign act of card counting or by pulling off a play as audacious as Kelly Sun’s multi-million-dollar edge sorting move – and you’ll discover that getting asked to leave casinos is an occup
People say that Dr. Edward O. Thorp wrote the book on blackjack, and it is no exaggeration. Back in 1962, when nearly everybody thought that blackjack was a game of luck, the university professor used computers to devise a system for uncovering mathematical advantages at the table.
The year 2012 was a sweet one for celebrity poker pro Phil Ivey and Cheung Yin “Kelly” Sun, a woman who would become known as the Queen of Sorts.
Michael Kaplan is a journalist based in New York City. He has written extensively on gambling for publications such as Wired, Playboy, Cigar Aficionado, New York Post and New York Times. He is the author of four books including Aces and Kings: Inside Stories and Million-Dollar Strategies from Poker’s Greatest Players.
He’s been known to do a bit of gambling when the timing seems right.