Manager of the MIT Blackjack Team
Johnny Chang was the longtime manager of the world-famous MIT Blackjack Team. The exploits of the MIT Blackjack team have been featured in best-selling books and documentaries and are the subject of an upcoming Hollywood movie. Besides their success in winning at blackjack, Johnny and his teammates have succeeded in bringing the world of top-level blackjack play into public consciousness.
Blackjack 101 at MIT
Johnny Chang's introduction to blackjack took place, naturally, at MIT - The Massachusetts Institute of Technology - when he was an undergraduate student. Although his first love was mathematics, he decided to major in electrical engineering because electrical engineering was the best department in MIT.
Between semesters, MIT offers IAP (Independent Activities Period) mini-courses on non-academic just-for-fun subjects. In January 1979, Johnny took an IAP course on blackjack card counting. At the time, he attached little importance to it. After all, as a struggling young student, he did not have the bankroll that one needs to start playing blackjack for real money.
Two years later, Johnny noticed a sign posted on the MIT campus: "Make $300 over spring break." Intrigued, he attended the advertised meeting, where he learned that the money was for playing blackjack. He decided that $300 was a good sum of money and, besides, "it sounded kind of cool." He underwent some training and testing at MIT and, during spring break 1981, Johnny Chang got into the car and headed for Atlantic City as a member of the MIT Blackjack Team.
A Career of Winning at Blackjack
Johnny's career in blackjack was not smooth sailing from the outset. He made his share of strategy errors and counting errors. Nevertheless, the managers of the team did not give up on him. They simply moved him to a less responsible position on the team while he continued to practice and to learn from his mistakes. Over time, he became one of the leading players on the team.
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The MIT Blackjack Team continued for a number of years as an informal organization of MIT students and ex-students. In 1992, Johnny reorganized the team as a general partnership called Strategic Investments. Later, Strategic Investments disbanded, and Johnny formed his own blackjack team. His idea was to run the team as a business, with rigorous standards of recruiting, training, R&D, and accounting.
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Johnny Chang's team experimented with advanced blackjack strategies such as shuffle tracking and ace sequencing. Johnny found, however, that these esoteric techniques tended to distract the team members from the more important strategies for winning blackjack. He decided to focus solely on the fundamentals: blackjack basic strategy and blackjack card counting. From that point on, the team had phenomenal success at the blackjack tables and ultimately won more than $10 million from the casinos.
Elected to the Blackjack Hall of Fame
At the 2005 Halloween Blackjack Ball, Johnny Chang amazed the best blackjack players in the world by counting down two decks of cards in 33 seconds. "Counting down" means taking a deck from which a few cards have been removed, looking through it, and identifying the missing cards. To count down two decks in 33 seconds takes almost superhuman powers of concentration and memorization.
Johnny Chang was elected to the Blackjack Hall of Fame in 2007.
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