Jeffrey Ma talks about home, blackjack and Bringing Down the House

By Chet Williamson

Growing up in Worcester, Jeffrey Ma was just a good kid, exceptional with numbers. In college, he was especially skilled with those adding up to 21 — as in blackjack.

Jeff is Ben Sherman, the central character in Bringing Down the House, the bestselling book about a cadre of whiz kids from MIT who broke the bank in Las Vegas. It was written by Benjamin Mezrich and recently made into the film 21 starring Kate Bosworth, Lawrence Fishburne and Kevin Spacey, which opens nationally on March 28.

"I went to May Street Elementary School and Forest Grove," Ma says. "Then I sort of left the Worcester world and went to a prep school in New Hampshire, Phillips-Exeter Academy. Then I went to MIT."

Jeff Ma

Ma says his inclination toward digits happened at an early age. "My dad was a huge proponent of math," he says. "Education was very important to my parents. My dad is a professor at WPI. My mom was a nurse/anesthetist at Memorial Hospital."

His parents are Maria and Prof. Yi Hua "Ed" Ma. Evidently his two sisters have the same proclivity — they, too, went to MIT. "We used to have to do math every morning during the summer just to stay ahead," Ma says. "I was doing algebra at a very young age. So math was definitely stressed from the beginning."

Maria says her son was a very good student who loved sports. "Yes, it was probably our fault," she adds, joking. "When he was little, he collected baseball cards and could memorize all the names and batting averages."

The story of Bringing Down the House takes readers on a wild ride, one that Jeff at first kept from his parents. They learned of the book just before its publication.

"My parents are a big factor in my life, but it was a hard thing to tell them all about it," he says. "It took a while for me to get comfortable to tell them the whole story."

Ma says, though traditional, they took it well. When 21 made its premiere in Vegas earlier this month, he was accompanied by his parents. "I think they liked it," he says. "They had a great time. They got to meet a lot of the stars."

Speaking of the film, in which he has a small part as a dealer, Ma says, "It's neat because it portrays blackjack and what we were doing in such a fun way that many people don't get to see."

These days Ma is banned from Vegas casinos, so, when not attending film premieres, he spends his time on the up and up with Protrade, an online sports "stock market" that he co-founded with Michael Kerns in San Francisco. o