Stumbling around Amazon’s Unbox video store looking for a movie to rent last night, I happened across “21.” It’s the film about a group of MIT students who beat the Vegas casinos to the tune of millions of dollars by counting cards at Blackjack as a team. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge fan of Amazon’s Unbox service in combination with our two Tivos. There are currently almost 6,000 movies for rent, which blows away the selection at Apple’s iTunes store. And we can easily watch everything right on our TV sets because Unbox downloads directly to our Tivos (you select which exact Tivo from a handy drop down list).
So then I watched the flick. It was pretty fine as these sorts of mainstream movies go but I kept getting the strong sense that Hollywood had gussied up the story by adding all sorts of implausible story bits. Did one of the kids really get beaten up in a casino basement? Did someone really lose $200,000 in two bad hands? There are many more such incidents but mentioning them would give away too much of the plot.
Wanting to know more, I recalled that the movie was based on the book “Bringing Down the House” by novelist Ben Mezrich and that the book had been excerpted in Wired Magazine. Sure enough, a search on Wired’s site for “MIT card counting” pulled up just one result: Mezrich’s article. I tore through that in a few minutes but it wasn’t enough of the story to fact check the movie. So I flipped on my Kindle and jumped to the online Kindle store. For a mere $7.99 and a wait of about 3 seconds, I had the full book in hand, electronically speaking of course. I read about halfway through before it was so far past bed time that I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
As I lay in bed, visions of sugar plums danced in my head, or at least visions of the future of entertainment. It’s a groovy little ecosystem that Amazon has engineered and I can only hope it continues to expand.
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