Non-fiction, but exaggerated
I know Ben Mezerich and "Kevin", and used to play on "Kevin"'s team. The story is mostly true, although much exaggerated. Much of the story is from years ago where casinos were not required to report CTR's, and so people played on fake names with a huge bank roll all the time. 350K would be unusual (unless we had 4-5 big players and 20 total people going out for the weekend). 100K would be more typical, and that's just 'cause we were conservative. As the rules in vegas changed, the team changed. People started playing on their real names, and using real SSN's. That led to "Kevin"'s IRS audit (quite unplesant, but the team helped out with some), many burn outs, and the rise of gorilla play. You're much happier to have a lightly trained gorilla that only takes signlas burnt out, than a highly skilled big player that can count, track shuffles, ace track, etc.
Anyhow...the team is mostly retired. It got too hard to play in vegas, people kept getting kicked out, and we all got older and tired of spending every weekend playing blackjack from 12-8am. Nothing worse than flying out of Boston on Friday night, getting to Vegas at midnight (3am Boston time) and being expected to play BJ all night long.
In response to the questions above...we did hoard chips. They did set off the X-ray machine every time, but the airport people never really realized what they were looking at (who can tell a real 1K chip from a fake one?). We did use a SD box in Vegas for a while (we had a teammate that lived there), but it got to be too much coordination on Sunday afternoon as we were all hustling for the plane, so we ferried it.
As for the small fortune of benjamins by the bed...that used to be true, but as I said, the team stopped playing (hence the book) and I'm sure "Kevin" has lost most of his money in the stock market, or sports betting :)
I used to read this forum pretty regularly, but I kind of got tired of it...and gave up my Green chip membership. Figured I'd come back to see what people here thought of the book.
JT