Andy Bloch is one of the greatest poker players to have never won a World Series of Poker bracelet or a World Poker Tour title. But no other well known poker pro out there has on their resume what Andy Bloch has and that is Andy is a former member of the famous MIT Blackjack Team which used to take Las Vegas for millions of dollars.
This past week Andy Bloch took some time off from his busy schedule to sit down and talk to some UNLV students about his life and what he learned while hitting it big in Las Vegas. Andy was drilled with questions from how much he would make in a single night when he used to count cards for a living all the way to what its like playing poker for a living and he was even asked to answer questions about the famous movie “21” which depicted the life of the MIT Blackjack Team back in in the 80’s and 90’s.
Most of the questions that were brought up did in fact touch base about his MIT Blackjack playing days and about how close the movie “21” came to the actual life he lived. Andy had responded saying that all movies will stretch the truth but a lot of the movie was true, for example, when a high roller would sit at the table the spotter would actually use a code word that would let the high roller know the count and in fact some of the words used in the movie actually were the words used in real life. Some of the story lines from the movie also were false as well, for example, Andy said that the signals that were used to let the high roller know that the table was hot was false and only the high roller was the one dressing in disguise and not the spotters since well they are only playing table minimum.
Andy made it clear that he was not their to talk the students into becoming full time professional poker players or blackjack counters, but in fact to live life to your fullest and take all of lifes little lessons and use them to your advantage.