Blackjack Tournament Strategy 1 - Introduction

Blackjack tournaments combine the fun of playing blackjack with the excitement of a tournament and the possibilities of large payouts with only a small entry fee. More importantly, as you are playing against other players instead of the house, a skilled blackjack tournament player can actually make a lot of money by simply playing better than the average gambler.

This will be the first of a series of blackjack tournament strategy articles aimed at making PokerNews blackjack players the best tournament players going around. As such, this will be mostly an introductory article.

Introduction to Blackjack Tournament Play

Most blackjack tournaments are played with multiple tables of six players who compete against each other in each round of play. Generally, blackjack tournaments have elimination formats, where only the winner or 1st/2nd qualify to go through to the next round of play.

Every round of play will have a set number of hands (50, for example) and, in tournaments, all players begin the first round with an equal amount of chips. When the winners advance, some tournaments make all players start with an equal amount of chips again, while others allow players to take their stacks through to the next round. Each round will have an Allowed Range and players' bets must be within this range.

Like poker tournaments, blackjack tournaments have a button on the table which rotates clockwise. This button designates where the cards will be dealt, with the first card always dealt to the box which has the button on it. The reasons for this are obvious - each player gets their turn to be dealt cards first and rather than one player acting first for every hand, it's rotated around the table. If one player had to act first for every hand, he would be at a disadvantage to the rest of the table.

Generally, the prizepool consists of 100% of the tournament entry fees paid by the players. However, if there is no extra tournament fee paid by players for the house, the house will generally take a small percentage out of the prizepool for the costs of running the tournament. This small percentage is easily overcome by a skilled player.

Sometimes, online casinos put on a blackjack tournament with a guaranteed prizepool. If they don't have enough entries to pay for the prizepool, they will be out of pocket, which is fantastic for everyone that entered that tournament as there is extra value. We'll do our best at PokerNewsCasino to bring you word of any guaranteed blackjack tournaments held by any of our reviewed casinos as they are often great value.

Practice up on your blackjack play and in the next article, I'll cover some basic blackjack tournament strategy!

Ed note: Play a Blackjack Tournament at Casino Del Rio.

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