Busting Vegas, Ben Mezrich
Busting Vegas, Ben Mezrich
List: $16.99 | Sale: $11.89
Club: $8.49

Busting Vegas
A True Story of Monumental Excess, Sex, Love, Violence, and Beating the Odds

Author: Ben Mezrich

Narrator: Ben Mezrich

Abridged: 5 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 09/27/2005

Synopsis

Semyon Dukach was known as the darling of Las Vegas. A legend at twenty-one, this cocky hotshot was the biggest high roller to appear in Sin City in decades, a mathematical genius with a system the casinos had never seen before and couldn't stop -- a system that had nothing to do with card counting, wasn't illegal, and was more powerful than anything that had been tried before. Las Vegas. Atlantic City. Aruba. Barcelona. London. And the jewel of the gambling crown -- Monte Carlo.Dukach and his fellow MIT students hit them all and made millions. They came in hard, with stacks of cash; big, seemingly insane bets; women hanging on their arms; and fake identities. While they were taking classes and studying for exams during the week, over the weekends they stormed the blackjack tables, only to be banned from casinos, harassed, on the wrong end of guns, and beaten in the notorious back rooms of casinos.The stakes were high, the dangers very real, but the players were up to the challenges, the consequences be damned. In the classroom, they were geeks. On the casino floor, they were unstoppable. Busting Vega$ is Dukach's unbelievably true story; a riveting account of monumental greed, excess, hubris, sex, love, violence, fear, and statistics that is high-stakes entertainment at its best.

About Ben Mezrich

Ben Mezrich graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991. He has published twelve books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Accidental Billionaires, which was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film The Social Network, and Bringing Down the House, which has sold more than 1.5 million copies in twelve languages and became the basis for the Kevin Spacey movie 21. Mezrich has also published the national bestsellers Sex on the Moon, Ugly Americans, Rigged, and Busting Vegas. He lives in Boston.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Eric_W on June 17, 2015

The book opens with a girls’ lineup in a Nevada brothel. (That will get your attention.) He follows the chosen girl up to a room, 232, and there the girl leaves and he meets up with the Russian MIT student who had used a technique that would take millions from the casinos. It was the safest place to......more

Goodreads review by Shannon on January 08, 2020

Gambling against the house isn’t my thing. Gee, I don’t know. It just that this story got drama but nothing dramatic enough to hook me in! Also, this story have too many gaps in between events...just not for me.......more

Goodreads review by Jake on November 29, 2024

A fantastic book. I’ve been in a reading slump for months-this busted me out of it and was impossible to put down. Drama at every turn, fleshed out and exciting characters, and gasp-worthy twists and turns throughout. Even better than it is based on a true story. The mark of a good piece of media is......more

Goodreads review by Jeff on June 30, 2014

Busting Vega$ doesn't ring true. Falls short as a straight up bio, with obvious embellishments and revisionist fantasy sequences attempting to spice things up. Clearly a skewed point of view, written to appease Semyon Dukach, who apparently was the only one willing to spill the story. And the books......more

Goodreads review by Rae on October 05, 2014

Breaking Vegas is a kind of sort of follow up to Mezrich's other Vegas book Bringing Down The House (later made in the movie "21"). Breaking Vegas follows another MIT Blackjack team, one who've developed a new system for beating the casinos as opposed to the straight up card counting team from Bring......more

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List