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In 1975, Stanford Wong came out with Professional Blackjack by Stanford Wong. Our hero had a Ph.D. in economics and this helped him a lot in his researches. 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. Land-based 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 maximum bet.

All the counting system Wong published had common feature was the Hi-Lo Count, and like Revere’s count, used the easy divide-by-remaining-deck(s) approach to running count adjustments. Some fifteen years after Harvey Dubner had proposed the Hi-Lo count values, his system was available in a format both fully optimized with strategy of blackjack 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 (BP) team approach, but allowed a solo card counter to attack shoe games invisibly, and without a team of spotters.

During the early 70th, Dr. Nick Bace began developing the first concealed blackjack computer, and by 1972, Keith had started using a computer in the Nevada casinos to play max bet blackjack. By the mid-’70s, Nick and his son, Marty, had met Al Francesco, and they would be putting together teams of players using computers to beat the blackjack tables.

Nevada had no laws at that time prohibiting the use of devices at their tables. Nick’s first computer weighed fifteen pounds. He went on to develop dozens of concealable computers and other electronic devices over the next two decades, ever smaller and more powerful.

This computer communicated its decisions to the player with buzzes and taps on the sole of the player’s foot. It was not easy to use one of these devices. It essentially entailed learning to “type” with your big toes. Even once you had memorized the codes, inputting them via the toe switches was a chore. It took weeks or even months of practice to get to the point where you could use the device at casino-dealing speed without foot cramps stopping you.

In the toe of each shoe there were two “switches”, or buttons - one above each big toe and one beneath - for a total of four switches. Each switch conveyed a different code to the computer, which was a small epoxy-encased device that was strapped to the calf beneath the trousers. The computer itself was about the size of a pack of cigarettes, but thinner. By using a series of toe taps, kind of like Morse code, the player could relay to the computer everything it needed to know in order to make a decision in a blackjack game: which cards had already been dealt, what cards the player held, and the dealer’s upcard.