Not Naza24 many have the ability to win astronomical amounts from casino games. But there are also exceptions. Let’s remember that the well-known professional player, Phil Ivey, collected the sum of 9 million dollars in April 2014. But this win was neither his first nor his last colossal win in a casino game. Although the house has a large edge, there are players who have managed to collect very large sums. Maybe they were lucky, maybe the universe was in their favor. Here are the biggest wins in game 21 history and more!
THE MIT STUDENTS WHO BEAT THE SYSTEM 21!
You’ve surely heard of the movie 21. It features some fresh students who use math to create a formula to beat the house edge in the game 21. The real story didn’t go exactly as it did in the movie, but one thing is for sure: the students took Vegas by storm. A team of students used a card-counting technique that allowed them to know whether the following cards were high or low. When players were waiting for high cards, they increased their bets. Despite what the famous movie Rain Man suggests, you don’t have to be a genius to count cards. Counting a dozen packages is not much more difficult than counting just one. But if you raise or lower the bet correctly frequently, the dealer may ask you to leave the table. MIT students got around this problem by working as a team. Several members counted the cards, and reported the counts to a third member, who bet exclusively on the high-stakes tables. The rest of the students distracted the dealer with even higher bets, so as not to draw attention to the one who was using the information given by his colleagues. The team won in style. Over time, they made millions of dollars.
THE MASTER OF BLACKJACK
A single player named Don Johnson did even better than all MIT students combined during a 6-month period in 2011. He didn’t count cards. Instead, what he did was to negotiate with the casino to have a more special house edge. In the first phase, he looked for casinos with a favorable house advantage. He played at the tables with an optimal number of decks. The tables he played at allowed him to choose the Split option for each favorable hand, splitting it into 4 separate hands – many casinos only accept one split, and others not at all.
Johnson was picking dealers who folded when their hand total approached 17, but which also included an Ace. He stayed at the tables where he could more or less easily double his bet. Some casinos forbid this when the hand total reaches 9, 10 or 11. As a result, Johnson won $15 million in just three casinos in half a year!