Thomas Hyland aka Tommy Hyland was born in New Jersey, USA in 1956.

He is famous for his Blackjack card counting skills and for managing the longest-running Blackjack team which was started in 1979.

His Early Years

He spent most of his childhood in New Jersey, and this is where his interest in gambling started.
As a child, he used to play games with friends which involved throwing pennies at a wall, and they would make bets on which penny landed closest to the wall. The bets were initially just pennies but then crept up to quarters. Tommy then started betting on other things like whether he would win a cricket game or a game of golf.

Once he got to High School, he stopped placing bets himself but started collecting bets instead. At one stage he got his calculations wrong and lost $400 so stopped taking bets and concentrated on getting a scholarship to Wittenberg University in Ohio.

The Start of the Blackjack Gambling

During his college years, he used to play Poker at various friends dormitories until he read a book by Lawrence Revere called “Playing Blackjack as a Business.”

Tommy and his friend practised the methods in the book and then started going to casinos to test out their skills. They weren’t very successful until Tommy read another book by Stanford Wong about card-counting. The book mentioned that one must work in teams to be successful, and this is exactly what Tommy did. He got a Blackjack card-counting team together.

Sometimes the teams made millions in one night and other nights lost a small fortune.

They then made Blackjack computers which was a form of cheating which got Tommy arrested many times when the casinos caught him and the team.

Tommy Hyland Today

Tommy no longer manages a Blackjack team but can still be found in casinos today playing Blackjack, albeit not at the previous levels of play.

The Early Years of Stanford Wong

Stanford Wong was born in San Francisco in 1943. He is known as the Blackjack Guru and has dedicated his life to playing Blackjack and writing books about Blackjack.

One would think that given his surname of Wong, he would be of Asian origin. However, his real name is actually John Ferguson. His pseudonym is Stanford Wong which he chose to add some Asian mystic to the name.

In 1964 Wong started teaching courses in Finance at the University of San Francisco. It was here that he started to play Blackjack regularly.

He didn’t enjoy teaching very much, so he decided to pursue his career in Gambling and published his first Blackjack book in 1975. It was called “Professional Blackjack”.

Blackjack Books and Computer Program

In addition to writing and publishing Blackjack and other games books, Wong also owned a publishing company that used to publish books written by other gamblers.

In the 1980s Wong designed a computer programme called Blackjack Analyzer which was a blackjack odds analysing software.

He also wrote a book which was called “Wong on Dice”. This book was about how to throw the dice to beat the odds at Craps tables.

Wonging

Blackjack players may have heard of the term “wonging” or “wong”. This term referred to a specific technique in Blackjack where a player sits out the hand and watches the cards in play until the deck becomes advantageous. This is the reason why many casinos do not allow mid shoe entry at their blackjack tables.

Stanford Wong has dedicated his life to Blackjack and is an esteemed author and consultant to other Blackjack players.

Where is he now?

He currently lives in California with his wife and two adult children. His publishing company is based in Las Vegas, Nevada.