Wonging is a method first introduced by Stephen Wong wherein a blackjack player watches a table and uses card counting techniques to determine the time when the more favorable cards will be dealt before joining in on the game. wongers are card counters but have an additional advantage of sitting out during the parts of the game where players have a less chance of getting blackjacks thus avoiding having to lose money unnecessarily.

If you are already a card counter and are good at it you will find wonging to be an easy strategy to practice an implement. I’m not really sure about this but I think shuffle trackers can also practice wonging since they also know how to count and specialize in knowing which cards are in which section of the deck. What wongers do is they just hang around a table and let the game start without joining. The  wonger then simply stands back and tries to appear like a casual observer but is actually backcounting as the game progresses. After a few hands the wonger will then be able to determine, just like any card counter can, if the cards to be dealt are more favorable for a blackjack to happen. If this is the case the wonger then will decide to join the game as a latecomer and reap the benefits of being dealt the better cards along with the rest of the players already at the table.

There is nothing really illegal or wrong about wonging but many blackjack players tend to get really irritated or offended by it. Wongers of course join tables where mid-shoe entries are allowed, which is more often the case than not unless the maximum number of players have already been reached. This means that most of the players in the table are used to people jumping in and joining a game mid-shoe and have no problem about it. What irritates people about wongers is wonging itself or the fact that they join in only when the cards are favorable. Though it makes perfect sense for any player to want to lessen the chance of losing money, and wonging of course does this, the problem is that wonging does seem to be a bit unfair to other players since they bear all the brunt of getting the unfavorable bunch of cards while the wonger shares only with the favorable cards. Wonging is like sharing a cake that everybody else helped bake. Though blackjack players who complain about wonging might seem to be simply sour graping to others I do understand their gripe. For me wongers do not really cheat out other blackjack players of their earnings but it does exhibit bad manners. I wouldn’t care if wongers cleaned out a casino with their technique but I still feel bad for the average blackjack player whose advantage is diminished just a bit since the good cards get spread out a bit more thinly when another person enters the game so that the good cards run out more quickly.