Blackjack Tournaments

It goes without saying that a perfect grasp of basic strategy play is essential in tournament conditions. Making mistakes on big bets can be extremely costly in terms of chips and a single bad play might eliminate you from progression. Placing small bets reduce your risk of ruin for the round. Indeed a very successful strategy used to be placing small bets until towards the end of the round, and then going against the lead with much larger bets. While this is still a successful approach when the other players at the table all bet big from the beginning, on a table with other conservative betters this will not work.

The tournament strategy advocated by most experts today is a hybrid approach. By sticking with small bets for the most part then placing big bets at the correct time in the round. This then means you beat those who play big from the start and wipe-out their chips, and also compete with the other conservative players with those well timed big-bets. This is most effectively employed when you have third base position for the round, are able to see the bets of your competitors and can size your wager accurately enough to take the lead without needlessly risking additional chips. Of course, this has to be sized in such a way so that if the entire table beat the dealer, that you will still take the lead.

Unfortunately for the uninitiated, in tournament play you are only given a limited amount of time to decide how you are going to bet. The pressure is on. This is what makes tournament play so exciting, not to mention the potential for those big prizes! The final thing to note about tournament strategy is that your play will vary depending how many hands are left for that round. If you are nearing the end of the round and are not the table leader, it makes more sense to place large bets at this point, taking the ‘all or nothing’ approach before you are so far behind that it would become impossible to lead the table.

I do not profess to be at all experienced with tournament play, having only competed on a handful of occasions. I can however refer to Ken Smith’s website, which provides some excellent introductory tournament strategy articles that you should definitely check out. Current tournaments are listed in the BJ Tournaments widget on the right of this page.

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