Mark Shanahan of the Boston Globe tracks down Jane Willis, the female member of the "MIT blackjack team", a group of collegiate math whizzes (not all of them from MIT--Willis herself was a student at Harvard Law School at the time) who stormed the casinos to use their card-counting skills to rake in the big bucks. This story--after a great deal of fictionalization, and after being filtered through the already fictionalized book Bringing Down the House bu Ben Mazrich--serves as the basis for the new movie 21, in which Willis is played, more or less, by Kate Bosworth. Willis, who hails from Mount Vernon, Illinois, is now a 38-year-old, twice-married lawyer working in a Boston firm. Once upon a time, she didn't like to talk about her involvement in the blackjack team for fear that it would hurt her career or freak out her parents (who finally found out about it six years after she'd stopped hitting the tables). But when she's asked now why more people aren't aware of how she picked up extra money in college, she just shrugs: "Sounds weird to say, but it just never came up."
Willis and the boyfriend who eventually became her first husband--both of the confirmed "math geeks", she says--got roped in because they both knew one of the big players in the group, Jeff Ma. "Jeff would occasionally have an expensive bottle of wine or champagne, and it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Then he told us about Vegas. I think it dawned on him that we could play blackjack and also give the team, which was mostly Asian and male, a little diversity." (Attention, Rush Limbaugh!) She soon discovered that her gender gave her an edge, since the security people keeping an eye out for counters tended to not suspect women. 21 fabricates a romance between the Bosworth character and the Ma stand-in, and it exaggerates the riches that came her way. As a "spotter", it was her job to keep an eye on a game and count cards until the time was ripe to signal Ma to appear, join the game, and start vacuuming up the casino's money. She and the other spotters were paid a percentage of Ma's winnings; Willis, who Ma says only worked with him about once a month, would clear about three thousand bucks over the course of a rich weekend. (Ma says that he figures he made more than a million dollars from the tables while the team was in operation.) Though the work didn't entail the James Bond dress-up techniques that are in the movie--and Willis stresses that counting cards isn't illegal, however much it may burn the casino bosses' asses--and Willis describes it as a "grind," she recalls getting a charge out of the excitement and the rush of winning. It's an interesting story, even if the moviemakers thought they had to "improve" on it.
