Mark Shanahan of the Boston Globe tracks down Jane Willis, the female member of the "MIT blackjack team", a group of collegiate math whizzes (not all of them from MIT--Willis herself was a student at Harvard Law School at the time) who stormed the casinos to use their card-counting skills to rake in the big bucks. This story--after a great deal of fictionalization, and after being filtered through the already fictionalized book Bringing Down the House bu Ben Mazrich--serves as the basis for the new movie 21, in which Willis is played, more or less, by Kate Bosworth. Willis, who hails from Mount Vernon, Illinois, is now a 38-year-old, twice-married lawyer working in a Boston firm. Once upon a time, she didn't like to talk about her involvement in the blackjack team for fear that it would hurt her career or freak out her parents (who finally found out about it six years after she'd stopped hitting the tables). But when she's asked now why more people aren't aware of how she picked up extra money in college, she just shrugs: "Sounds weird to say, but it just never came up."
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