P.S. We’re now breaking down the answers at the end of each edition, so you get a little more insight.

Picture it. Early 1980s. Vegas is booming. Casinos are raking in cash hand over fist, confident the house always wins. Then a pack of math kids from MIT strolls in with backpacks full of investor money and starts draining blackjack tables like they’ve hacked the Matrix.

This was the MIT Blackjack Team. A crew of students and grads who turned card counting into a business empire that spooked the casinos and made millions.

It started in the late 1970s when a handful of MIT students realized they could take Edward Thorp’s math-heavy book Beat the Dealer and actually, well, beat the dealer. Blackjack isn’t pure luck. If you keep track of the cards left in the deck, you can know when the odds tip in your favor.

That meant if you were disciplined enough—and had the memory of a computer—you could swing the edge away from the house. These kids were not only disciplined, they were brilliant. They weren’t just good at math. They were MIT good at math.

The team didn’t just wander into casinos throwing down chips. They built a system like it was a startup. Investors funded the bankroll. Players went through training camps. There were spotters, who sat quietly at tables keeping a running count of the deck. When the deck turned hot, they signaled the big players, who swooped in and started laying down huge bets.

It was organized, it was legal, and it was devastating. While tourists lost their mortgage payments at the roulette wheel, MIT kids were splitting millions in profit.

At its peak, the team ran like a corporation. Profits were split among investors and players. People bought in like it was a hedge fund, only instead of Wall Street traders, you had twenty-somethings with cheap suits and poker faces.

They operated for years, sometimes raking in hundreds of thousands in a single weekend. One story has a player walking out of Caesars Palace with $100,000 stuffed into his pockets.

But the more they won, the more they stuck out. Casinos didn’t take kindly to kids walking in with backpacks and walking out with bank. Security caught on. Faces were photographed, logged, and circulated. Players got the tap on the shoulder, escorted out, sometimes even roughed up. The message was clear: counting cards might be legal, but casinos hated it with a passion.

If you’ve seen 21, you know the Hollywood version of this story. It’s slick, it’s sexy, and Kevin Spacey is in it. The real thing was less glamorous. The team was constantly paranoid. One wrong move and the whole system fell apart. Some players couldn’t handle the pressure and washed out. Others got banned from casinos across the country. The money was real, but so was the burnout.

And unlike the movie, nobody got rich forever. Most players made solid cash but eventually moved on. It was a hustle with an expiration date, not a golden ticket for life.

Still, the MIT Blackjack Team changed the game. Casinos ramped up their security, added more decks to make counting harder, and started using tracking software to flag unusual betting patterns. The cat-and-mouse war between players and the house went high-tech because a bunch of kids with spreadsheets embarrassed the system.

And the legend stuck. Even today, blackjack players whisper about card counting, about beating the house, about the team that proved it could be done.

Vegas loves to tell you the house always wins. And 99.9 percent of the time, it does. But for a decade or so, a group of nerds from Boston proved you could flip the script with nothing more than discipline, teamwork, and absurdly sharp math skills.

They didn’t use trick dice, loaded decks, or sleight of hand. They used probability. The deadliest weapon in Vegas wasn’t a gun or a grift—It was a kid who could run numbers faster than the dealer could shuffle a deck.

So next time you sit down at a blackjack table and lose twenty bucks on a single hand, just remember. Somewhere out there, an MIT alum is laughing at the memory of turning a backpack of cash into the Strip’s worst nightmare.

“Snowblind” is Sabbath at their peak powers, loud and raw but with just enough groove to make you want to put your fist through drywall. The song is about cocaine, which they were very much consuming by the shovel in the early 70s, but it plays bigger than just a drug track.

Everyone talks about Paranoid or Master of Reality, but Vol. 4 is Sabbath at their weirdest and most experimental. You get “Snowblind” alongside tracks like “Changes” and “Supernaut,” a lineup that shows just how much range they had when they weren’t buried in tour chaos and powdered excess.

If you only know Sabbath from the radio hits, “Snowblind” will remind you why these guys rewired rock music. It’s heavy, it’s messy, and it still sounds dangerous fifty years later.

Give it a listen 👇

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Armored Truck Driver vs. Highway Hijackers

Dashcam footage from South Africa shows a calm-as-ice armored truck driver weaving through bullets and ramming cars during an attempted hijacking. No panic. No hesitation. Just pure badass behind the wheel.

Watch it 👇

1985 Honda Scooter Ad