"Table Talk with Jeff Ma '90 and Jane Willis '87" from The Exeter Bulletin, Spring 2008
Jane Willis and Jeff Ma
Jeff Ma ’90 didn’t play much blackjack at Exeter. For Ma and his friends in Webster, poker was the game of choice most of the time someone pulled out a deck of cards.
But if he’d stuck just to poker, he wouldn’t have made a fortune living a dual life as an MIT student and a high-roller in Las Vegas. He wouldn’t have gained the notoriety needed to start ProTrade, an online fantasy sports experience that projects players and teams into a virtual stock market. And he certainly wouldn’t have spent much of the spring promoting 21, a blockbuster movie inspired by his experiences that opened March 28.
His days playing poker in Webster did foreshadow the seven years Ma would spend with a team of MIT students in Las Vegas, employing an intricate system of card-counting to take the casinos for millions. The two fellow students who first recruited him to join MIT’s blackjack team, in fact, did so because they were impressed with his poker skills.
“They didn’t play poker—neither of them, to this day, plays poker,” he says. “But they had witnessed me playing poker, and they saw I had the manners and demeanor to be a perfect blackjack player.”
For her part, Jane Willis ’87 didn’t play cards at all at Exeter. When she went to Harvard, she only played bridge with a few friends. She’d never played blackjack at all before Ma, an acquaintance through mutual friends in Cambridge, recruited her to join the MIT team.
Her job as a “spotter” usually was to stand near tables (or play at tables for low stakes) and count cards until it was time for the primary player—often Ma—to take a seat and place the heaviest bets. She had to keep careful track of the cards in play and in the deck, but she also had to avoid attracting too much attention to herself. (Card-counting is not illegal, but casinos typically ask patrons suspected of card-counting to leave the premises.)
As a woman, she says, she was easy for pit bosses to overlook. “There are casino personnel who don’t think women are good at math and don’t think women would be playing blackjack in a serious way,” she says. “So they would pay less attention to me—far less attention. People even would tell me how I should play my cards, trying to help me, and I could play into that to some degree.”
Ma and Willis note that the movie takes some liberties with their story; for example, each of the film’s characters employs disguises and fake identification, something Willis says the team never did. But the challenges the characters face aren’t any different from those Ma (played by Jim Sturgess) and Willis (played by Kate Bosworth) encountered.
“Initially, the main character—myself, or whomever—is conflicted about getting involved,” Ma says. “When he gets into it, there’s a transformation that occurs with elements of his personality. How his personality transforms—they did a good job with that.”
Says Willis, “It’s really a coming-of-age story. The emotions the characters go through are very real. The movie is fictionalized, but it’s still about, ‘What am I going to grow up to be? Who am I going to be?’ ”
Both Ma and Willis say skills learned at the Harkness table proved surprisingly useful at the blackjack table—for instance, a collaborative approach to problem solving. “At Exeter, even math is taught around the Harkness table,” Willis says. “We’d put up problems, put up proofs and share that with other students. That kind of teamwork was similar to when our team would go to the MIT classroom and practice counting cards.”
“Exeter gave me a head start,” Ma says. “Exeter gave me that part of my personality. Blackjack unleashed it on the rest of the world.”
Casinos caught onto the success of the MIT team in the late 1990s. Each player went on to different endeavors; none of the players still counts cards. (Ma did end up on the other side of the table for the movie; he has a cameo as a dealer at Planet Hollywood.)
But Ma hasn’t been idle since his blackjack career came to an end. The notoriety from the 2002 book on which the movie is based (Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich) landed him a meeting with investors who pitched to him the idea that became Citizen Sports Network in 2004. A water polo and baseball player at Exeter and a rabid sports fan in general, he bought right in.
ProTrade was the company’s first venture; it allowed fans to “play the market” with the fortunes of sports teams and players. The company now has expanded to include sports applications on social networking sites, including a partnership with Facebook to build a platform for NCAA Tournament brackets.
Willis, meanwhile, is a trial lawyer in Boston with Ropes & Gray. And while a courtroom and a casino have plenty of differences, they’re not as dissimilar as one might think. “Kate Bosworth asked me if I missed the thrill of playing blackjack, playing on a card-counting team,” Willis says. “I told her the job I have now is thrilling in a very similar way. Walking into a courtroom is a lot like walking onto a casino floor—you’ve got to be ready for whatever’s going to happen and think quickly and be prepared.”
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