Blackjack and wonging: a story of success
In 1975, Stanford Wong came out with Professional Blackjack. 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.
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. Wong had a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, hence his pseudonym. As four-deck shoes were the most widely available games in Las Vegas by that time, this original approach was brilliant.
So, at last, some twelve years after one his friend 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. This playing style has since become widely known as wonging.