Strategy To Win Blackjack Tournament

SHORT VERSION In short, the best ways to win Blackjack at casinos are: Stick to the basic guide, relentlessly. You can win with just using the basics, and you won’t lose more than it hurts. To develop a winning strategy for tournament Blackjack, the player must first know what is required to win. Most multi-table tournaments have two, three or four rounds of elimination or qualification.

Ask twenty-one blackjack players about their experience with the game, and 20 will report back about their adventures trying to outduel the dealer.

Well-timed double downs outdone by a picture-perfect draw. Waves of face cards and aces underneath ending the hand early when they make blackjack.

Wishing for a bust card to come followed by the thrill of seeing it hit the felt. And that wry grin old-timers get when they’ve finished cleaning your clock.

Indeed, the dealer and their cards lie at the center of traditional blackjack. Contrary to popular belief among recreational gamblers, the objective of blackjack isn’t to make a 21 total — it’s simply to wind up with a better total than the dealer.

In fact, the bona fide Bible of blackjack is “Beat the Dealer,” an instructional masterpiece written by mathematician Edward O. Thorp back in 1962. Subtitled “A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One,” Beat the Dealer was the first book to present both basic blackjack strategy charts and a proven method of counting exposed cards to gain an edge on the house.

But as important as the dealer is to blackjack as most players know the game, a select few specialists enjoy a hybrid version where the dealer is rendered irrelevant.

Tournament blackjack is a clever fusion of casino blackjack and Texas Hold’em poker shootout events.

In case you haven’t heard of a shootout in poker, this format sits ten players to a table in winner-take-all format.

After every table has crowned a winner, those players move on to another table and repeat the process.

Finally, the last ten table winners reconvene at the final table, where the lion’s share of the prize pool is divvied up on an escalating scale.

Blackjack tournaments use the exact same concept, with five players sitting along with a dealer to start the game. Rules vary depending on the house of course, but the basic gameplay structure goes like this…

Everybody begins the tournament with an identical bank of chips, so for the sake of explanation, we’ll roll with the $100,000 used by the short-lived World Series of Blackjack (WSOB). More on that experimental blackjack tournament tour a little later on, but for now, just know that WSOB players started out with $100,000 to work with.

From there, players can bet as they please — using minimums ($1,000) and maximums ($50,000), of course — during the course of a 30-hand session.

To mimic the ramping up of pressure caused by blind bets in poker, blackjack tournaments usually have the minimum bet increase, either at random or on a scheduled basis.

In any event, the goal of blackjack tournaments is deceptively simple. Players are hoping to have the most chips in play at their table when the 30-hand threshold is reached.

This means the eventual winner won’t always be the player who applies perfect strategy pertaining to their hand, but the one who sizes their bets strategically along the way.

Strategy To Win Blackjack Tournament

To get a full look at the rules used in blackjack tournaments like the WSOB, check out the tour’s official rules below.