The team lay low for several weeks. When they went back to work two months later in Atlantic City, they substituted one of the counters in the role of big player. Yet they encountered another casino countermeasure during their second playing session. This one differed from what had happened in Vegas. A pit boss came to the table after spying their new big player's purple chips in the betting circle. He said to him curtly, "Sir, we'd appreciate you taking your action elsewhere. I think you might too." A week later in Connecticut they met up with similar obstacles. Mississippi did not extend them red-carpet treatment either. Before long they came to the conclusion that their card-counting operation was in serious jeopardy. And then they realized it was over. The revered concept of team play conceptualized and made famous by Ken Uston and then legendary by the MIT team was in danger of becoming extinct.
The five members of the disbanded counting team returned to lives far away from blackjack tables. They stayed away a year. But then Curtis, who had been the founder of the team and aching to get back in business, came up with an idea he fancied would once again make team play viable. He immediately contacted his four ex-partners and told each one excitedly, "I think I've found the new way to card counting riches." When one of them responded, "The new wave to card counting riches," Curtis liked the way it sounded and would later name the second coming of his team "The New Wave Card Counters." What he explained to them was that they had to completely revolutionize the concept of team play. First, the old method of counters signalling big players to the table had to be done away with. Casinos were too hip to that, especially since all that publicity from the MIT team. His new idea was that three or four members of the team would play together at the same table. They would all count down the shoe, bet and play accordingly. None of his mates grasped the concept at first, so Curtis painted the scenario. "It's simple. Several of us sit at the same table. If we can get a bet spread of one to sixteen units, say $100 to $1,600, we can still play with a significant edge.
So what we do is count down the shoe from the first hand. Say it's a $25 minimum table and four of us are at the table. We each bet $25 to start and stick with the minimum bets until the true count hits +2. In that case we want to get $200 on the layout, if we're increasing our combined bet one unit at that level. Instead of us all going up to $50 bets to make our total bet $200, say one of us bets $100, another bets $50 and the last two stay at the minimum $25. Aggregately we have made the $200 bet, but only two of us increased our wagers. Let's say that the true count goes up to +3 two rounds later. Now we want to increase the bet to $400. Here's what we do: we have the player who previously bet $100 drop to $50, the player who'd previously bet $50 increase to $150, and the two players who'd been betting the minimum $25 go up to $100 each. That way we have effectively increased our bet to four units as a team, but individually the first