Down the House (which was originally excerpted as a feature story in Wired magazine). Under Ma, the team hit Vegas casinos left and right for a cool $5 million bank before the effort came to a end. Six years after House’s publication, the book was adapted into the movie 21, starring Kevin Spacey and Jim Sturgess, a Brit whose character stood in as a proxy for Ma (who also had a cameo in the film as a blackjack dealer).

By that time, Ma was already a successful entrepreneur, having cofounded ProTrade, which specializes in integrating market-based solutions and social networking functionality into fantasy sports providers. That venture later evolved into Citizen Sports, which was scooped up by Yahoo – itself one of the fantasy sports industry’s biggest players – but Ma stayed back as the company he helped start was folded into the Sunnyvale-based search giant. Since then, Ma has released his new book The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big In Business, which discusses how sports franchises and businesses of any age can use statistics and new-wave math to excel in the corporate world.

Wired.com caught up with Ma by phone last week as he was cabbing it from Manhattan to the airport for a flight back to his Bay Area home, fresh off a stint as a co-host for Fox Business Network’s Varney & Co. morning show. Ma discussed water polo, misconceptions about sports geeks, why he didn’t join Yahoo, and (following MIT and Citizen Sports) what his third act might look like.

WIRED.COM: What were your favorite sports growing up?

I played mostly baseball and water polo. I wasn’t very good at baseball, but I was OK at water polo. I played it in college and also coached for seven years.

Where did blackjack come from?

It wasn’t until I was coming into my senior year at MIT, and a lot of my friends would go away to Vegas and come back with all this money, and I thought I should check out what all this was about.

How much did you bank altogether at the casinos in Las Vegas?

We probably banked about $5 million as a club. But from the way we divvied up the salaries, it was more complex. I probably took home about a million bucks.

It’s been well-documented that many of the events and characters in Bringing Down the House were, let’s say, highly dramatized. Same goes for 21. In terms of what you guys actually did at the casinos, what did the book get right?

Well, the book got a lot right. About 75 percent of what’s in Bringing Down the House is true. It’s just that people’s names have been changed and there are some composites, but it’s mostly true in terms of what we did and how we did it.

How often do you get to Las Vegas these days?

I get to go once in a while – and often people will want me to go out for their bachelor parties and stuff like that – but I get out there probably about six to 12 times a year.

Do you still keep in touch with any of your MIT Blackjack Team friends?

A little bit, not a ton. We’ve all kind of gone our separate ways. It’s kind of like when you work with someone at a job. When you’re working with them on a day-to-day basis, you talk to them a lot. And then when you go your separate ways, you keep in touch with the people that are close to you, but a lot of the people you lose touch with.

After graduating from MIT, you went on to found ProTrade and Citizen Sports, and these are companies that work a lot of with sports simulations and software and apps. Where did your affinity for fantasy sports come from?

That affinity started at a really young age. I’ve played fantasy sports for about 20 years, so I was doing it before the web and before any online services. We would literally get the stats from the newspaper and enter them into a computer or calculate them by hand. I’m still in what was probably one of the first fantasy football leagues, same one for about 18 years now. It really just came from my love of sports and the fandom that I had when it came to sports. It was natural. When most kids were fantasizing to become baseball players, I was more interested in becoming a general manager for a franchise. For a while, I wanted to be a sports medicine doctor, because that was going to be my way to be around sports and use my intelligence. I think that idea of being in orthopedics or sports medicine took me all the way up until college, when I finally just decided I didn’t want to be a doctor. But the notion of being around sports was certainly something that was always in my mind.

One of the classic stories about Dan Okrent, who helped invent rotisserie baseball, is that he’s never won his fantasy baseball league. Have you ever won your league?

Yeah, absolutely. Fantasy, on any individual season, is a lot of luck. I would say that football much more so than baseball, which is more skill-oriented. I’ve done pretty well in baseball, and I usually finish near the top. The skill in most fantasy sports is to consistently finish in the top third. I think, if you’re a good player, you can almost always do that. Actually going from two, three, or four to first place, there’s a lot of luck involved, but I do fine.

A lot of older, mainstream media members have this view toward statgeeks – and specifically sabermetricians in baseball – as being people who tend to take a very cold, distant, numbers-based view of sports. Is that a misconception about people that like to blend their statistics with sports?

I’m not sure it’s a misconception as much as it is a stereotype. With any stereotype, there’s some truth to it. Now, the idea of using numbers in sports is very polarizing. And it shouldn’t be, right? All that sabermetricians are doing is they’re trying to take advantage of advancements in technology that allow us to capture data and information in ways that we never were able to before, and therefore utilize that information to make better decisions than ever before. So as mercenary or cold – as you said these traditional media people see them – these people are in ignoring any emotional or human part of sports, the pushback from the sabermetricians is, “Well, you guys are ignoring the technology advances that allow us to categorize that emotion in a way that’s more than just simple observation.”

It’s what my new book is supposed to be about. A lot of the books that have been written about this type of thing – meaning statistics or data – are very cold and scientific, and they’re very math-oriented and seem like academic research. I tried to make my book a lot lighter than that. I try to make it about this whole process, because I think it’s important that the staunch traditionalists of sports understand – and not just sports, but in every field – those experts, those people that have made their living in that field, they need to also understand the value of using data and statistics. Ultimately, they’re going to be able to help the geeks build better models. They’re going to help them understand why certain models don’t work, or why certain situations can’t be described by numbers. But they have to be very accepting of it, and the problem very often is that the stat people make themselves unapproachable by being standoffish or coming off as the incumbent experts.

No one is going to be against something that they really think will help do their job better, but they’re going to be against something if you say, “You’re wrong. The 30 years of experience that you have here – and everything you know from that – are wrong because I have a number that says you’re wrong.” And that’s never going to be met with very much acceptance or willingness.

It sounds like the ability and the willingness to use statistics and odds is more of an evolution of business practices. Do you feel like, especially older businesses and companies, ignore these sorts of evolutionary concepts at their own peril?

Yeah, but I think that what’s happening in sports is just an analogy for what’s happening in a lot of fields. You look at medicine, you look at media, you look at anything like that that has very traditional experts that have succeeded at many levels and you look at those areas where emotion has played a large part. It’s hard not to be emotional when you’re a gambler or when you’re making a difficult sports decision. But no one really makes good emotional decisions, because your judgment is swayed. So having a framework, or a way to make those things objective rather than subjective, is important.

The reason that I use sports and gambling in my book is because they illustrate the dangers that we get into when we ignore data and information. I try to stay away from the word “statistics” because it often elicits a response in people that you don’t want. But it really is just about data and information and trying to use that systematically in a better way.

And sports and gambling are two great analogies because they’re interesting and fun. But at the end of the day, they’re just a microcosm of what’s going on in the larger business world.

So your company Citizen Sports was acquired by Yahoo back in March, but you didn’t go over with the rest of the company. Why not?

For me, there were a few reasons. I wrote this book and I knew that, regardless of Yahoo, I was likely going to take some time off. I’m definitely more of an entrepreneur than I am a big-company person, so the idea of going over to Yahoo at that point was not something that I wanted to do. I enjoyed the people I met with during the Yahoo process, and there were definitely some cool opportunities there. But for me, I wanted to be able to promote the book and take a look at the opportunities in front of me without just jumping into something.

What is next for you?

I’m not sure yet. I do a lot of corporate speaking and I wrote this book, and I just got done being a cohost on Fox Business. Doing something like that, which is outside of my comfort area, I feel like I could go be on SportsCenter and it would be really easy for me. It was definitely harder for me because it was not something I’ve spent as much time on, but doing TV was fascinating.

Is there something that you’re really itching to do?

I’m definitely interested in this idea of measuring customer sentiment and looking at data to measure that, both in social media and online. I think there’s a lot that can be done there, and it’s a field that a lot of people are trying to do, but no one’s really solved it. And I don’t know if you can necessarily solve it, but that’s one of the mistakes that people often make when they try to use numbers. They try to be perfect, but improving on that area is something that’s fascinating to me.

Photo: Sony Pictures

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Authors: Erik Malinowski

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