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Blackjack and wonging: a story of success
In 1975, Stanford Wong came out with Professional Blackjack. Wong had a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, hence his pseudonym. Wong described his playing style, which included table-hopping shoe games to avoid playing at negative counts. It had never occurred to the casinos that a counter might be watching a table from the aisles, waiting for an advantageous count before jumping in to bet.
The counting system Wong published was the Hi-Lo Count, and like Revere’s count, used the easy divide-by-remaining-deck approach to running count adjustments. So, at last, some twelve years after Harvey Dubner had proposed the Hi-Lo count values, his system was available in a format both fully optimized with strategy indices, and presented with a simple methodology of play. Wong’s table-hopping approach to shoe games was in many ways similar to Al Francesco’s Big Player team approach, but allowed a solo card counter to attack shoe games invisibly, and without a team of spotters.
