Meet J P Massar

JP Massar (aka 'Mr. M') was a founding member of the MIT Blackjack team and was one of its managers from 1980 until 1993. He has appeared in two television documentaries about the MIT Blackjack Team, most notably 'Breaking Vegas' aired on the History Channel.

Mr M. has been chased around Atlantic City, barred numerous times from various Las Vegas casinos, stripsearched for a non-existent computer in the Caribbean, and treated to all-expenses-paid vacations in Monte Carlo. Mr. M has not played blackjack seriously since 1998. Since then, he has often been sighted at the World Series of Poker. He was (and is) a friend and 'coach' to Robert Varkonyi, the 2002 World Series of Poker champion. (Unfortunately, Mr. M has failed to have such good fortune, or anything close to it, himself at the WSOP).

When he is not watching his retirement funds plummet, Mr. M lives quietly in California with Kristin and Pretzel, doing occasional software consulting and coding in the only civilized programming langauge known to man: Lisp. While a member of the MIT Blackjack Team, Mr. M was also a software engineer for Thinking Machines Corporation, programming one of the world's fastest supercomputers (at the time), The Connection Machine.