CHICAGO (WBBM) - Growing up as a self-proclaimed "math nerd," attending grade school in the early '70s at the Eugene Field Elementary School in East Rogers Park, a public school in a Chicago neighborhood in serious decline, Jon Hirschtick's life was anything but glamorous.
"I was never east of Detroit or west of Minneapolis until I was an adult," he said with a laugh. "We never went on an airplane. We never went anywhere."
But he had a father who told him to work hard, no matter what he did, and teachers who took a special interest in him.
"Whatever happened to me at Field, I think it set the stage for me," he said. "It gave me an ability to work and an ability to think."
Thinking ahead, he said, is far more important than being able to do math when counting cards -- an appetite and an ability that led him to the MIT Blackjack Team made famous by Ben Mezrich's best-selling 2002 book "Bringing Down the House," and now, in fictionalized form, in the hit movie "21."
Hirschtick was just another student on MIT's Boston campus until one day in 1984, he spotted a hand-lettered poster seeking students who wanted to make between $2,000 and $6,000 a month by gambling.
He said he was skeptical at best, but checked it out.
"I was still skeptical after hearing it, but I decided to take the next step and learn a little about the system," he said.
Learn he did. Hirschtick said he spent hundreds of hours learning the art of card counting, a practice that had been around since the 1960s but was being taken to a new level by the MIT team.
Only when he had mastered the system, he said, was he allowed to travel with the team.
It was a life-changing moment.
"As soon as I walked into the casino and heard the slot machines, and saws the place and realized what we were about to do, I have to tell you I thought, This is something for me," he said."This is something I'm really going to enjoy to do."
It was a double life that sent him from the fast lane to the slow zone and back again each weekend.
"You practice. You go to Vegas. It's like 'wow.' You win money. You come back on Monday mornings to MIT and it's hard to readjust," he said.
Hirschtick said the fun lasted for about five years, when the paranoia about being caught and thrown out -- or worse -- began to overtake it. He said at the time, he began to plan for life after blackjack. He said he steadily wound down his involvement, and by 1994, he was out of blackjack, married and using his winnings to found the Boston-based software company Solidworks, which is best known for its 3-D imaging programs.
But he said blackjack had left its mark -- in a positive way.
"Blackjack gave me a powerful lesson, which was that sometimes you can win when almost everyone thinks it's impossible, and that was definitely the case with Solidworks as well," he said.
Less than four years after founding Solidworks, at the height of the 1990s tech boom, he and the original shareholders sold the firm for $350 million. Today it employs 800 people and Hirschtick still works for it, acts as a company spokesman, and gives inspirational talks.
He calls his business plan "responsible risk-taking."
Hirschtick said he gambles occasionally these days, but has no desire to dive into the Vegas lifestyle or heavy gaming again. Despite that, he said, the new movie serves as a sometimes heady reminder of what once was -- not that he minded rubbing shoulders with the movie's stars at a preview showing recently.
"It's not often that nerds like me -- math nerds from a Chicago Public School -- get to meet movie stars," he said. "That was a fun moment for me."
Does he identify with a specific character?
"Ben Campbell," he said. "The foundation of the movie rings true. The characters are well cast. The emotional ride they go through is good. And then on top of that foundation of the guys playing blackjack, all that's built on that foundation is fiction."
But still fun. And he said the part about being marked for expulsion is most certainly true.
Five years ago, Hirschtick said, he took a friend from the old neighborhood in East Rogers Park to Las Vegas for a 40th birthday present -- nearly a decade after he stopped playing. Entering a casino, he made the mistake of using his real name.
They were asked to leave.
"The computers they have in Las Vegas help keep reputations intact for a long time," he said.
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