I've spent some time on card counting and it's anything but fascinating. The theory behind it is easy to grasp, and the implementation is pure drudgery. You learn a card counting system, then you crank away at it. All the big casinos know what to watch for, and if you are successful they will ask you to leave.

Poker, on the other hand, is much more difficult, and just as dependent on mathematics. Your strategies depend on who you're playing, and how they're playing against you in any particular hand. Much more fun. And with poker, you're playing against other individuals, so you don't have to worry about the house shutting you down if you're playing too well.

I agree with you that it isn't especially difficult to learn how to card count, or understand the theory behind it (it is probably very difficult to do it well in a casino, but that's a different issue).

That said, I actually do find it fascinating, mainly because of the history behind it. A lot of discoveries look simple in retrospect, but keep in mind this was a complicated game that was essentially intractable until the advent of supercomputers (early reviews of thousands of hands weren't even enough to get accurate readings on the odds).

It took a math professor from UCLA (Thorpe) with an interest in programming to really get a handle on the odds. We could all write a program to calculate basic strategy odds now, but at the time, it was very, very innovative.

While Hi-Lo and other counting systems seem pretty simple, I think it was a stroke of genius to think of this the first time. And it was another stroke of genius to use a programming language to determine exactly when the count turned the expected return in favor of the player. Add in statistical systems for bankroll management (ie., how do you use a small but positive expected return into a 99% chance of making money while keeping bankroll growth as high as possible), and you have some real sophistication considering that it hadn't been done before.

The people who did this the first time were brilliant, and personally, I think it is pretty fascinating.

Then it would seem like you have more than a passing interest! Which is fine too. I haven't played too much poker, I kind of missed the fad a few years ago while I was overseas... but it seems really interesting, and it gives me something else to go research ;)

The Cliff-notes version is that in black jack you have a slight statistical advantage since you know what cards have already been played. If there are lots of face cards left in the deck, then the dealer has a higher chance of busting. It's too small for a single player to make much money consistently (just a couple % advantage), but the MIT guys would have several people ("spotters") playing small hands, watching for a deck with lots of high cards left. They would signal to the "Big Players" who would come in like they owned the place, play $10K per hand and make a killing on the hot deck. Then when the cards ran out and were reshuffled, the Big Player would split and look for another hot deck at another table. This way they could multiply the gain when they found a hot deck.

"Bringing Down the House" (the book the movie was based on) was one of the best of the 100 or so books I've read in the last year.

PS How cool is it that Kevin Spacey reads Wired?