Andy Bloch
speaker
350 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 26 Apr
Andy Bloch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'm WBEZ Chicago.
It's This American Life.
Okay, here we go.
Blackjack, $10 table, $10.
High limit room, which no one is in.
Monday, late morning.
This American Life producer Robin Semien and I are in a casino that will remain unnamed here on the radio because we did not have permission to record.
I did not ask for permission due to the nature of our visit.
Come on, let's see over here.
We stand by one of the blackjack tables and Robin does a quick scan of the cards.
What's the count on this table?
We were there to count cards, to play blackjack and count cards while we did it, which gives a player such a big advantage against the house that most casinos ask you to leave the table if they catch you doing it.
And how did we end up here?
Well, we've gotten a lesson the day before in how to count cards.
We used to say that you could teach a piece of wood to play blackjack.
We got our lesson from Andy Block, who played blackjack for what is possibly the most famous group of blackjack card counters, the so-called MIT blackjack team.
The winnings inspired a best-selling book and a terrible Hollywood film called 21.
These were real MIT students.
Andy studied electrical engineering.
There is no reliable way to know how much they won.
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