
Sacrificial hands are hands where you specifically bet low because you purposely plan on blowing the hand. This occasionally means playing sacrificial hands.

In tournament blackjack, on the other hand, it’s about getting ahead of your fellow players, to them be damned, and to extend your lead, however possible. The general consensus to non-tournament blackjack is for all players at a table to play accordingly to the standard procedures that ultimately benefit the table. This is when the psychological game comes into play. The other half would be protecting your position, in some cases, that would mean hitting on a twenty, even though it’s consider suicide, and/or not hitting on a ten. Whether you bet high or low, use a progression or not, is only half of the game. In this case, it would be your initial bet. Due to the nature of this tournament, there’s no way of getting out of a hand without any recourse. Most standard blackjack strategy comes into play, when it comes to tournament, however, betting strategy changes. Standard rules of blackjack apply, including insurance, splits, double downs, and surrender/late surrender (the last two at the discretion of the house). The top players per every table are then chosen at random to their new table, with a new chip stack, equal to all players at the table, and the process begins again, until one table remains. At the end of twenty or twenty-five hands (at the discretion of the tournament director), the game ends, and the top one to three chip leaders advance to the next round (the number of advancing players per table are again, at the tournament director’s discretion). As in holdem’, the start of the deal rotates clockwise at every new hand.

If you run out of chips at any point of the tournament, you’re immediately out.Īt the beginning of a hand, the first to be dealt determines what they choose to bet, so on and so forth until all players bets are on the table. Set-Upīlackjack tournaments pit seven players against the dealer, with a required minimum and maximum bet per every hand. When most folks hear “card tournament”, they automatically think about some kind of poker tournament, however for those who have never experienced a blackjack tournament, here are the basics.
