The film stars Jim Sturgess, Kevin Spacey, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Bosworth, Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts, Aaron Yoo, and Kieu Chinh.

Ben Campbell, a mathematics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is accepted into Harvard Medical School, but cannot afford the $300,000 tuition.

He also reveals his own personal history with Micky, once a successful card counter who got Williams fired after winning over a million dollars in one night at his casino while he was away at his father's funeral.

In exchange, Williams commits to allowing Ben to keep his winnings for that day, but later double-crosses him as he is leaving, taking the bag of chips at gunpoint.

As Massachusetts Institute of Technology did not allow filming on campus, the MIT school and dorm interiors, the gymnasium and the alumni reception were all shot at Boston University.

[4][better source needed] In its opening weekend, the film grossed $24,105,943 in 2,648 theaters in the United States and Canada, averaging $9,103 per venue and ranking first at the box office.

By the end of its theatrical run, the film grossed a total of $157,802,470 worldwide—$81,159,365 in the United States and Canada and $76,643,105 in other territories, against a budget estimated at $35 million.

[7] However, the real-world MIT blackjack team has not been consistently majority-Asian, and only one of the characters in the book was based on a real person; the rest were composites or fabrications.

[11] Ma, who is Chinese American, told USA Today, "I would have been a lot more insulted if they had chosen someone who was Japanese or Korean, just to have an Asian playing me.

"[12] He also says that major Ben Campbell plot elements, such as his father's death and the romance between him and Kate Bosworth's character, were fabrications and not based on anything that happened in Ma's life.

[15] In pre-production, the producers and the book's original writers predicted that the Las Vegas casinos would be unhelpful, as a film that told viewers the basics of card counting might hurt their bottom line.

A featurette included with the DVD completely and accurately describes the "Hi-Lo" system used by the MIT Blackjack Club and by Rosa's team in the film.