'It's a clever technique to tell the story, but because of it, it makes the ending too predictable. Former team leader John Chang said that the movie's scholarship interview is a plot device that 'never happened' in real life. One of the reasons I ended up not going to Harvard Medical School is because of blackjack and all the money I could make there.' ĭid the scholarship interview really happen? 'I actually did want to go to Harvard Medical School,' admits Jeff Ma, 'but I didn't actually play blackjack necessarily to go to Harvard Medical School. Unlike in the movie 21, his mother never offered him a life savings of over $60,000 for med school. Jeff Ma, the real life Ben Campbell, came from a well-to-do family. Bill Kaplanĭid Ben really join the blackjack team to earn money for med school? M' in the History Channel documentary Breaking Vegas) was an MIT alum who had helped Kaplan manage the original team in the early 1980s, shortly after the first casinos opened in Atlantic City.

An influential member of the original team, Chang would later re-team with Bill Kaplan as a co-manager in the early 1990s. John Chang graduated from MIT in 1985 with a degree in electrical engineering. Massar, and John Chang, the fact is there is little, if anything, that resembles either of us except that he started and ran the team and was focused on running the team as a business,' says Bill Kaplan.

'While Ben Mezrich has been quoted as saying that Micky Rosa was a composite of myself, J.P. Massar were also very much the basis for 21's Micky Rosa. Arguably, the most notable is Bill Kaplan, a Harvard Business school graduate who had also done his undergraduate studies at Harvard.

The 21 true story reveals that the real MIT Blackjack Team was led by three individuals, none of whom were professors. In the movie 21, an unorthodox math professor named Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) leads the team.

Casino movie based on true story