With the recent outbreak of blackjack fever hitting around these parts, I thought I'd share my thoughts on blackjack's answer to The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King. So you can all relax, I'm talking about Ben Mezrich's awesome 2003 book about the MIT Blackjack team, not the Queen Latifah/Steve Martin, uh, comedy.

"I try to control my breathing as I stroll through Logan International Airport. Terminal C is buzzing and chaotic, an over-air-conditioned hive of college students escaping Boston for a long weekend. I am dressed like everyone else: baggy jeans, baseball hat, scuffed sneakers. But in my mind, I have as much chance of blending in as a radioactive circus clown. There's enough money hidden under my clothes to buy a two-bedroom condo. And to top it off, there's $100,000 worth of yellow plastic casino chips jammed into the backpack slung over my right shoulder."

From the first page, you know that you're in for a hell of a ride. Ben Mezrich takes you inside that world we all dream of visiting when we go to Vegas: The Rainman Suite, High-Class Strippers and Call Girls, hundreds of thousands of dollars thrown around like white chips during Chowaha at BARGE, and the thrill of not just winning, but consistently winning big.

Bringing Down The House is a great and quick read. It achieves the perfect balance of geekery, intrigue, and excitement, and will make even the most dedicated non-blackjack-playing poker grinder want to try counting their way to a big rack of chips.

Poker Pro Andy Bloch is one of the more well-known former members of the team, and when I discussed the book with him at last year's WPT Celebrity Invitational at Commerce, he told me and Poker Geek that he was pretty unhappy with the book, because it only told one particular version of one particular story. Poker Geek and I encouraged him to write and sell his own story, because, seriously, man. (Seriously, man, while often working with great success on me and my friends, failed to work with Andy. We'll try Dude!  and its variant, dude, seriously, next time we see him.)

There's a great excerpt from the book in WIRED 10.09 called Hacking Vegas. If you're not racing out to buy the book after you've read it . . . well, that's just one more thing we don't have in common.

Bringing Down the House is now out in paperback, and there's a movie script in development. Ben's newest book, which I have but haven't read yet, is called Breaking Vegas.