(PRWEB) August 1, 2010

In the mid-90s a new incarnation of the MIT Blackjack team, a select group of MIT students trained to count cards and play blackjack using optimal strategies to gain an advantage over the house, took Vegas casinos for millions. Jeff Ma was one of the students on this team. After meeting Ma and accompanying his team to Las Vegas to watch them apply their techniques at the tables it didn’t take action thriller writer Ben Mezrich long to realize he had a best-selling story staring him in the face. More than a decade later, Ma has now published his own book, in which he applies his experience working with and trusting in statistics to the business world, completely picking apart business decisions made on “gut feelings” and intuitions and running the faulty reasoning behind these decisions into the ground.

Jeffrey Ma is not the first blackjack professional to apply his skills and experiences to the business world. Other MIT players, such as blackjack pros Mike Aponte and Dave Irvine founded their own companies offering blackjack supplies and blackjack mentoring. Edward Thorp, the godfather of card counting, followed up his seminal Beat the Dealer with Beat the Market. After his work in the field of card counting Thorp went on to try his knowledge of probability and statistics on the stock market, making a fortune in the securities market by exploiting pricing incongruities.

And now Jeff Ma shares the business insights he has culled from his blackjack career in The House Advantage. Bearing in mind that this is a business book, Ma’s blackjack experience features prominently to underline the importance of trusting in what he dubs “the religion of statistics.” This is not surprising, since Ma identifies his defining moment as an evening at a blackjack table in Vegas where he lost $ 100.000 on two hands of blackjack. After initially feeling like his system may have failed him, he gathered up his courage and returned to win back all of the lost money and then some. Ma argues that when making business decisions many people do not properly research the statistics. People shy away from risky choices in business as in blackjack because they do not analyse the risk of failure properly and therefore overestimate this risk, missing profitable opportunities because of placing their trust on a “gut feeling” rather than on hard data.

South Africa has been involved with the casino gaming business since the 60s, and basic strategy and card counting are sought after techniques among blackjack players here as much as anywhere else. Unlike many American card counting celebrities however, South Africa’s blackjack heroes are not yet ready to stop lying low and claim celebrity status. Not surprising, since in blackjack, if you are an active player and you know something nobody else does, you keep it to yourself. Like in business as in blackjack, the right circumstances play a large part in the success of a venture or team. Bearing in mind the rich history of US blackjack, here’s to hoping more advantageous gambling regulations and gambling tax cuts will boost the popularity of blackjack in SA in the future.

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