Quote Originally Posted by bjanalyst View Post
I had made this suggestion of back counting and playing with different counts for the HL player who was thinking of switching to Wong's Halves (WH) for increased betting efficiency.

The WH is very similar to HL so you can pick up the WH count at the HL count you had for shoes that you actually play with very little loss in accuracy and use the HL indices for playing strategy and your hybrid HL/WH count for improved betting. You cannot do this with any two counts - the counts have to be very similar to do this switching.

If you can keep WH flawlessly for shoe after shoe including shoes you never play then great. But you even said WH was difficult.

You had mentioned in a previous thread that you do not like anything larger than level 2 and thought that WH being a level 3 count was very difficult.

So keeping WH is difficult even if back counting. So I was trying to think of a compromise where player would get most of he benefit of added betting efficiency of WH without having to keep WH for every shoe back counted.

Given that three of our four shoes are never played, if you are back counting each shoe with WH you are wasting a lot of mental energy in shoes that are never played. Better to save that mental energy for shoes that you will actually play is my thought where you will be sharp and not make mistakes because you are not exhausted from keeping WH for the 75% of shoes you never played and you will also be able to play more hours doing this.

So I thought a good compromise was to back count all shoes with the HL. If the tc(HL) > 1 only then start counting with WH picking up the WH count using the HL count you had as the starting point of WH.

WH is very similar to HL so you can then use HL indices with this hybrid HL/WH count and gain some of the betting efficiency of WH and save yourself lot of mental energy as you are keeping WH only when are actually going to use it.

Anyhow that was just my suggestion to save mental energy of keeping WH for every shoe including the 75% of shoes you never play.

Do you still think this hybrid HL/WH count is a bad idea?
Yes, I can keep a Halves count flawlessly shoe after shoe after shoe. It’s ingrained and is absolutely automatic.

No, it’s a bad idea to backcount with hi lo and convert to halves when wonging in. The big advantage with Halves is its ability to accurately identify weakness or strength in moderate counts. It’s easy to show remaining shoes where hi lo identifies a positive or negative count while halves identifies exactly the opposite situation.

Whatever count you start back counting with is the count you should finish off with.