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.