Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire.

We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney.

And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction.

We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime

campfire.

Almost everyone who walks into a casino feeling confident that they're going to walk out richer is what is technically known as a sucker.

Every game you play at a casino gives the house an edge.

Not much of one, otherwise why would people play. Players have to win a decent portion of the time. That's why they keep putting money down on the table. But behind the glitz and glamour, casinos run on cold mathematical certainty.

Over the long term, over hundreds of hands of cards and rolls of the dice and spins of the wheel,

the house ultimately always wins.

But what if they didn't? What if they didn't? The House ultimately always wins.

But what if they didn't?

What if people, through brainpower and daring, managed to beat the odds and come out on top?

It's a tantalizing thought, and for the people in these stories it was too tempting to pass up.

This is burning down the house, a casino bandit grab bag. So, campers, for this one, we're going to mostly be in Sin City, Las Vegas, Nevada, where millions of people have gone to try and score big with cards, roulette wheels, or dice.

We've got three stories for you about people who tried their best to put one over on the house and we're going to start with the famous MIT Blackjack team.

Now Blackjack in one form or another has been around for at least 500 years and probably a lot longer,

and human nature being what it is, you have to think that some form of card counting has been around nearly as long.

There are a lot of ways to do it,

and they can get very complicated,

but the core principle isn't that hard to grasp.

If you can keep track of the cards that have already been played,

...