In SD the deck composition can get out of whack so fast that a good EOR player tracking individual cards can get a large advantage quite quickly. A linear count would be far less effective. Some people can name every card played before the shuffle in a single deck game. A person like this would be giving up a huge advantage to employ a linear count. A tiny spread to a player like this is more powerful than a large spread to a linear counter at a SD game.
This doesn't sound right to me. A player using simple hi-lo with a 1-8 spread is going to slaughter a guy going 1-3 with memorizing the whole deck and using full indices.
Has anyone played SD with a greater than 1-4 spread? You'll absolutely massacre the game. I know the books recommend 1-4, but try it some time.
Hilo is weak in SD. I didn't say using indices but calculating the effect of the EOR for the cards played and the hand match up. Pure 100% correlation. Few have the ability to do this but if you do linear counting SD is a waste of time. Remembering the cards is the easy part. Memorizing the EORs for the important hand match ups is where most people give up. The sim dependent people might have a hard time understanding this. Doing the hand calculations drives the point home. Some hand like hitting soft 17 v 9 are rarely served by a linear count. They depend primarily on the number of 8, 9, A, 3 and twos in the deck. Surplus eights and nines favor standing while 3, 2 and aces favor hitting. Most reach a happy median of linear counting with side count adjustments for SD. Each card has its own hand match ups that it adjusts to determine the right play.
I don't know where you're getting your info, but Hi-lo is quite good for single deck. It's not the best, but it's still very good. Probably the best betting correlation of any count.
You seem to be talking about the importance of playing decisions, which I wasn't really discussing. Playing decisions just aren't that important, even if you memorize the whole deck. You make money in this game by betting when the blackjacks are on the way, not by knowing when to stand on soft 17 vs. a nine.