Life is game, game is life

In 1975, Stanford Wong came out with Professional Blackjack. Wong had a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, hence his pseudonym. The casinos looked for card counters by watching for their betting spreads. 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. 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. This playing style has since become widely known as wonging.

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 strategy indices, and presented with a simple methodology of play.