Blackjack and wonging: a story of success
In 1975, Stanford Wong came out with Blackjack. Wong had a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, hence his pseudonym. 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. This book was the next big advance for card counters. Wong described his playing style, which included table-hopping shoe games to avoid playing at negative counts. As four-deck shoes were the most widely available games in Las Vegas by that time, this original approach was brilliant. The casinos looked for card counters by watching for their betting spreads.
The counting system Wong published was the Hi-Lo Count, and like Revere’s count, used the easy divide-by-remaining-deck(s) 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 professional strategy indices, and presented with a simple methodology of play. This playing style has since become widely known as wonging.