Count was kind of poor at a 6d shoe but I had just made my restroom run so I stuck around. Wasn't ready to call it a night and I was way up.
Spotted a guy back-counting the past couple of hands and he just had to jump in right then and there. From the guy's perspective, the running count on the two hands would have been around +6 or so plus no aces had come out in all those little cards.
What he didn't know was that the running count for the whole shoe was around -10 and that virtually all the aces had come out already.
I looked across the table at him and was tempted to say,"Hey Wonger. right now really isn't such a great time to jump in if you catch my drift." But alas, I let him play.
And right on cue, here come the small cards. He doubles his 6-5 against dealers 5...He draws an 8 for total of 19....dealer has 6 in the hole and draws 7 for 18. So the guy lets it all ride. He thinks the running count is even better...but actually it is still negative. The guy gets a pair of 2's against dealer's 5. Digs into his pocket for more chips for the split. Gets a bunch of cards on each 2 (2, 3, 2, 8, something like that) and finishes around 18 on each. Dealer busts and that's the end of the shoe so he leaves. He walks away happily $400 or so richer, patting himself on the back praising the virtues of "short-wonging". He didn't see a single 10 or A in what he thought was an okay positive count and was actually overbetting a pretty negative shoe but sometimes you get lucky.
