Lucky streak

Card counter Jeff Ma sees his life turned into a Hollywood movie.

Even by the standards of tech entrepreneurs, Jeff Ma has an unconventional résumé. While he was a student at MIT, Ma made a bundle as part of a card-counting team that took the Vegas casinos for big money. His story became the basis for the non-fiction best-seller Bringing Down the House. These days he does motivational speeches for companies in which he talks about his time playing blackjack. Now his story has been turned into fiction for the new film 21, in which the Asian-American Ma has been transformed into Jim Sturgess, complete with a working-class back story and a dream of med school, none of which has anything to do with Ma’s real life.

Ma finds it all pretty hilarious. Of course, he can afford to be amused, since the movie’s release is likely to bring him more gigs inspiring managers with his stories of the gambling life. And the deluxe star treatment doesn’t hurt; when we caught up with him at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, he was basking in the perks. “Look at me now, staying in a beautiful place with studios taking care of me.… This has just been a blast for me,” he says with a broad grin. Then, with a little twist of irony, he adds, “The next month will probably be fun—as much fun as it is to do the same interview over and over again.”

It can be strange seeing your life turned into Hollywood fiction. “It was one of those things where you wanted it to be so accurate; you wanted it to mimic your life because you’re like, God, our lives were so interesting, they don’t need to change anything,” recalls Ma. “The second script draft really departed a lot from the story line, from the book. At first, that bothered me a little bit. But then when I saw it all on screen, it makes sense. There were so many moments that they captured in that movie that were exactly like they happened in real life.”

That’s not to say the film gets everything right. Ma notes that some of the workings of blackjack and card counting have been simplified. “There’s some really little card-counting details that might bother some people that are professional card counters; when I watched it, I was like, oh, that’s not quite right or that’s not it. But I mean that’s probably, what, 5,000 people in the world who would be feeling that.”

Still, Ma has a healthy attitude about the dramatizations. “Hopefully it’s an opportunity for everybody to feel what we felt, which was the rush, being those 10 to 15 people every weekend that leave Vegas winners. And there’s not many of them. But we were those guys almost every weekend we went there. And that’s a great feeling. I think if the movie can give everyone that same feeling, that’s what I want.”

Even after he graduated from MIT, Ma kept his hand in the card-counting racket. While working at the Chicago Board of Trade, he and a few friends ran their game on the local casinos. “We literally went to Elgin three times a month. It was so easy. A bunch of my friends would fly in, and we’d all stay in my studio apartment. We’d hop in some crappy little rental car—because I didn’t even have a car—drive out to Elgin, play all weekend and then come back to my little crappy apartment, and then they’d go home. And we did that for five, six months. We killed that casino. And I was a local celebrity around that casino, because I was the only one that was in there that was betting a couple thousand dollars a hand or a raise.”

Ma was, shall we say, unimpressed by the savvy of the local casinos. “They had no fucking clue about card counting. It was ridiculous how little they knew about card counting,” notes Ma with amazement. “One of the shift managers at the Grand Victoria actually pulled me aside and asked me if I was interested in investing in a new casino that he wanted to open. That’s how little he realized that I was part of this whole thing.”

The movie actually features the main character using his gambling experience to impress in a med-school interview à la Risky Business, an idea that might seem implausible until you learn that this detail is drawn from real life. “I remember on the bottom of my résumé, under activities or something like that, I put card counting. And so that itself made me get so many interviews. I remember one of my first interviews with O’Connor [a Chicago trading firm where Ma landed a job], the guy said to me, ‘Smart guy, but this thing on the bottom that you have in small print, it’s going to be the thing that gets you this job here. So you better figure out whether you feel comfortable talking about it.’” These days, that’s no problem.

21 plays for high stakes starting Friday.

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