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If you're hoping 21 is a how-to movie about how you can beat the blackjack tables in Vegas, you're out of luck. You really do have to be an MIT genius to figure it out. The movie just makes it look pretty. Jeff Ma is the real guy who developed the card counting system that cost Las Vegas millions. We tried to get him to teach us, but he's retired.

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CraveOnline: What was more lucrative, your gambling system or selling the movie rights?

Jeff Ma: It's a lot more lucrative what we did. Selling the movie rights, for me specifically, there's no comparison. We won between three to five million dollars in that time frame.

CraveOnline: The movie is condensed. What was your real time frame?

Jeff Ma: It was about seven years total. In the book it's condensed and then in the movie it's condensed even more because the movie's like two hours long.

CraveOnline: You hit other casinos, not just Vegas, right?

Jeff Ma: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we were all over. We were in Shreveport, LA, the Bahamas, Chicago, Atlantic City, all over.

CraveOnline: What does the movie get right?

Jeff Ma: It's interesting, I really feel like when people ask me what I like about the movie the most, I think the movie really does capture that high really well. Those moments, especially at the end, I've screened the movie probably six, seven times in the last couple weeks, and I always want to come back for that last couple minutes. It's incredible, just that high you see when Kevin and Jim are sitting at the table and they're just winning and winning and winning. The idea that there are very few people that leave Vegas winners and we were the ones that almost always left as winners, that's just an incredible high.

CraveOnline: Does it take anything away from the thrill of winning since you've worked out the probability?

Jeff Ma: I think that's a good question and a good point. It wasn't like happenstance that it happened but I don't think that takes away from the idea that we won. I understand what you're saying. It's like you can't get too excited because that's just the math and that's what's supposed to happen. But still, the idea of coming into a casino and taking it down is something that will never just become mundane.

CraveOnline: Did you feel the danger from security on your tail?

Jeff Ma: You feel a fair amount of danger just because they try to intimidate you when they don't like you. The idea that there's a Laurence Fishburne character chasing you around Vegas, that's true. There's definitely people that follow you from casino to casino in terms of surveillance and you wonder what will happen when you get caught. Now, of course rationally thinking, you think gosh, these are major corporations. They're probably not going to risk the lawsuit, but they do try to detain you and they do try to do things to intimidate you quite a bit.

CraveOnline: Did you encounter any security guys?

Jeff Ma: There's a lot of elements in the movie that are very different than what happened in terms of storyline. I wasn't trying to do it for medical school. My dad was there last night so he's not dead. He was sad to find out that he was dead. But there's so many elements in the movie that are so dead on, and what I mean by that are the feeling that you see Jim and Kevin get at the end when they're on this huge run, the way that they signal, the way that they train people, the way that they practice, the transformation that Jim goes through from sort of MIT nerd to the guy that can get Kate Bosworth. All those things are so right on. The sort of blurred lines that happened to him when he was in Vegas versus in Boston and would lie around in bed and try to order room service. Those parts, they captured so well, it's almost kind of eerie when I watch it because I wasn't there on set telling them what to do in a lot of those parts. They just were able to, Robert and these guys were able to basically capture those moments.

CraveOnline: Was there a Laurence Fishburne character?

Jeff Ma: Yeah, absolutely. There's a detective agency called Griffin Detective Agency and they used to follow us. We knew that they had a book with our pictures in it or some of our pictures in it. We were actually able to at one point gain a copy of that, a thick copy of all the people they had and so we saw some of the entries of the guys that we played with and what they said about them, what their aliases were, things like that, who their typical running mates were. It was pretty interesting.

CraveOnline: Did you go spend wildly after your first win?

Jeff Ma: A little bit but not really. When I was in Chicago, I had just moved there after school and we'd started making some money. I decided it would be really cool, because I was from a very modest family and didn't like to spend money and was brought up not to spend money. So I bought a watch for myself. I went to go look for a watch and I remember I was looking for a $300 or $400 watch and that seemed really expensive to me. Then I went watch shopping and realized there were watches that were a lot more than $300 or $400. So I ended up buying a $2000 watch which was really exciting. That probably was the moment for me when I was like, "Yeah, I have a little money. I don’t need to worry about money quite so much."

CraveOnline: Where's the watch?

Jeff Ma: It's sitting in my room right now. I don't wear it anymore. It is a memento though of how my life turned at that moment. I was living in a studio apartment with $400 a month rent in Chicago at that point after school.

CraveOnline: Who was your Kate Bosworth?

Jeff Ma: I had a Kate Bosworth in my life, so that character I think was somewhat a composite character. The Kate Bosworth, I think the character represented the girl that I had no chance with at MIT in Boston but in Vegas with increased confidence and personality and money, I could get. In the book it's a girl that I dated who was a Ram's cheerleader. You talk about the American dream, now that's every boy's American dream, to date a Ram's cheerleader. So that was the sort of Kate Bosworth character in my life.

CraveOnline: What are the biggest mistakes blackjack players make?

Jeff Ma: Well, first I would challenge the notion that what other people do at the table has any impact on what you do. That's a whole other story, the emotional aspect of gambling. I could yell at people all the time totally irrationally, but the reality is what they do has really no impact on what you do. It's just the cards are in there already. Gambling is very emotional though so I would never tell these guys what they should believe or what they shouldn’t believe. I just know what I believe.

CraveOnline: Don't you want to let the dealer break, so don't take the high card?

Jeff Ma: Yeah, but how do you know that you're taking the high card? It's all confirmation biased, meaning that if you do basic strategy, that's great, but what other people do, whether they do basic strategy doesn't matter or not.

CraveOnline: What mistakes do you think we make?

Jeff Ma: I think people make a ton of mistakes so blackjack inherently, if you play basic strategy, you're roughly at half a percent disadvantage to the casino if you play perfectly. When we played, we brought our odds up to about two percent, but the average player probably is at a three to four percent disadvantage to the casino because they make the wrong decisions constantly. Some of these things really will cost you in the long run, some of these decisions that are so clear that you should do one thing or the other and they do the wrong thing.

CraveOnline: You're discouraged from blackjack in Vegas now. Do you have aspirations for any other games?

Jeff Ma: Aspiration sounds kind of funny. I play craps just for fun, just like everyone else now. I say that when I used to come to Vegas, it used to be work. Now when I come to Vegas, it's vacation.

CraveOnline: You can enjoy gambling?

Jeff Ma: Yeah, it sounds like a GA commercial. "When the fun stops…"

CraveOnline: What do you think of keeping the money in the dorm ceiling?

Jeff Ma: It's not that far fetched. For whatever reasons, smart or not smart, we didn't like to use banks to keep money in. One, you don't want to be shipping around cash. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. You don't want that coming in and out of a bank account because it's difficult. You show up at a bank, "Yeah, this is my withdrawal slip. Oh yeah, that does say $100,000. Do you guys have that right here?" The other thing is you can put it in a safe deposit box, but then every time you've got to go on a trip, you've got to go and it's a pain to put things in a safe deposit box. So we did just leave them kind of thrown around our rooms. The one thing I would say is, we weren't even that imaginative in terms of where we'd put it. We'd put it in the bottom of a laundry basket or we would put it in a bathroom drawer underneath the shampoo or something. It was really just different places that we thought no one would ever look.

CraveOnline: What was the worst day on the job?

Jeff Ma: There's a scene in the book and it's sort of replicated in the movie where I lost $100,000 in two hands. We were very focused and we were very disciplined in how we did this and I lost $100,000 in two hands, basically just bad luck. The odds on those hands were probably about a five or six percent advantage over the casino going into those hands. But even if you have a five or six percent advantage, it's still a great chance you could lose. And I do. I lost five hands at $10,000 one hand and then five hands at $10,000 the other hand.

CraveOnline: You still believe in bad luck? Doesn't math get over that?

Jeff Ma: Well, you are. That mathematical principal applies to the overall year long of play or night long of play or weekend long of play, but it doesn't apply to each hand.

CraveOnline: Do you still see your teammates?

Jeff Ma: Actually a lot of them are back. There's a bunch of them back yesterday actually. Not all of them were people that I knew were going to be there and they all were at the movie. What was so incredibly great was how complimentary they were of the movie because they had nothing to do with it, they had every reason to have the sort of "not invented here" attitude and be like, "I didn't like it." And all of them said they really liked it. There were little details here and there that bothered them, and that gets into how much time do you really want to spend explaining card counting? But they really all liked it.