Back to The Blackjack Page
The Blackjack Page Archive

Blackjack Tournament Training - Part 7

My experience at Blackjack tournaments continues to expand and I like to think that I continue to learn more about how to win them. The Bally's Casino in Tunica held one recently and even though I didn't do all that well, I at least got to play a different type of format than usual.

There are basically two types of tournament formats. The first is what I usually play and that's called a "table winner" format, where "x" people from each table moves forward in the competition. The other is called a "winner take all" format where a certain percentage or set number of players with the most winnings move forward, regardless of whether or not you're the big winner at your table. Naturally, a big winner will probably end with the most chips at his or her table, but it's only your total that counts, not the hierarchy at that particular table. As you can probably guess, the first format rewards skill more highly and the second relies a lot on luck.

The tournament in which I played at Bally's had 36 people with the largest amount of chips moving forward, but then it switched to a table winner format. Because a winner- take-all format usually has a set number of people move forward, you don't really know just how much you need to win in order to qualify. Based upon past matches, it appeared that it would take about $4800 in total chips to qualify in this one. What happens is that you are given $1000 in play-money chips and then you play 25 hands of Blackjack, with a betting limit of $5 to $1000 per hand. Your total is recorded, then you are given another $1000 in play-money chips and you play another 25 hands. Your total remaining chips for those two rounds of play are then compared to that of all the other competitors and the 36 players with the most chips stay in the competition and the rest are eliminated.

So, my challenge was to turn $2000 into $4800 in 50 hands of Blackjack and that's not an easy thing to do. If I had some sort of "system" that could turn $2000 into $4800 in only 50 hands of play on a regular basis, I wouldn't bother entering a tournament - I'd just sit down at a table and go to work! Being a counter certainly doesn't hurt in a match like this, but it's also not very important in such a small number of hands, because the count might go in the casino's favor and I can't just get up and leave the table like I'd normally do. Knowing the format of the tournament and getting some help from someone who had played quite a bit in this type of match (thanks, Ken!), I had some time to plan a strategy.

Needless to say, you have to do some pretty wild betting to increase your stake by 250%, but there are a lot of ways to bet "wild". My first thought was to just pick an appropriate amount to bet on every hand that would give me a fair shot at my goal. Since we'd be playing two "sets" of 25 hands and had $1000 to begin each set, I did a little Blackjack math to arrive at an appropriate bet size for this strategy. On average, a player will win about 44% of all the hands s/he plays at Blackjack, will lose 48% and will push on 8%. Some of the wins will be "naturals" that pay 3 to 2 (average of 1 each 21 hands or so) and others will be doubles or pair splits (average 2 or 3 in each 25 hands). You never really know just how many hands you'll win in a small sample like this, but I thought 10 hands were reasonable. Those 10 hands may return 12 bets, though, due to doubles, etc. However, 15 hands would lose and there'd be some pushes along the way, so the bet size had to take all that into account. If my goal for one 25-hand match is to make a profit of $1500, thus leaving me with a total of $2500 chips for that round, it's obvious I'd need to win a "net" of $1500.

Winning only 10 hands out of 25 isn't all that difficult, if the ones you win are hands 1 to 10, but we all know that's not going to happen. On the other hand, I could lose the first 15 hands and win the last 10, but I'd probably be broke at hand 12, unless I was betting under $75 per hand and even then I wouldn't have enough left to make any kind of serious $$$. But what would most likely happen would be that I'd win a few, lose a few and very likely end up with a small loss or a small profit. Flat-betting isn't "wild" betting and only the most fortuitous run of hands would get me to my goal while betting like this.

So, why not a progression? You know, double my bet after a win (or after a loss, using what's commonly called a "Martingale" progression). That can work, as long as my wins come in streaks or, in the case of a Martingale, if the losses do not come in long streaks. I hope you know that no betting system can overcome the casino's edge in "the long run", but we're talking about just two sets of 25 hands and, to be quite honest, almost any system can work in a situation like that. But please notice that I said "can", not "will". If I were to start a Martingale progression at $25, and lose the first five hands, I'd be down $775 and couldn't make the $800 bet called for on hand # 6. Still, losing five hands in a row is a fairly rare event, but the big problem with a Martingale, at least in this situation, is that I'd be betting $25 as a "base" and it would be just my luck to win the first 10 hands, for a grand total of $250!

Okay, so how about a "double-up-after-I-win" progression? In that case, I could begin with a bigger bet, say $100, so that I'd have to lose the first 10 hands to get wiped out, but if I found a streak of wins, I could make some serious $$$. The big problem with a progression like this is that the last bet is, by definition, a large bet that loses. So, you bet $100 and win, up it to $200 and win, then up it to $400 and lose, leaving you down $100 in three hands of play. Even so, it's not the worst idea.

There are about a bazillion variations on this "win and up" progression theme, such as betting 1 unit, then 1 more, then 2, then 4, etc., which will help you against a sequence of win, lose, win, lose, but such patterns exist on a consistent basis only in the minds of the creators of these systems and, while they might work some of the time, especially in hundreds of hands of play, I had only 25 hands to make the magic happen. I won't bore you with the details of the other progressions that I considered, such as the D'Alembert, the Labouchere and the Fibonocci series, but I tried them all on Stanford Wong's Blackjack Tournament software, which is what I use for practice. Sure, most of them worked at one time or another, but none of them worked on a consistent basis, at least not often enough to give me the confidence that this was THE system for the match.

Then there's the "kamikaze" system that quite a few people actually use. This one is simple: you bet the entire $1000 on the first hand and if you win, you're "fat", but I wasn't about to drive 6 hours, pay a $500 entry fee and play what might amount to two hands of Blackjack! Besides, if I wanted to bet it all on one hand, I could just as easily do that at hand # 12, assuming I hadn't lost too much.

What my strategy really came down to was to bet conservatively in the first set of 25 hands to try and make a $1500 profit. Whether the count was in my favor or not, if my chip total was at or under $1000 (zero profit or a loss) by hand #12, I'd start "chunking" $200 bets. I had a goal of $1500 (again, total chips) for hand # 15 or 16 and a goal of $2000 for hand #20. Keep in mind that how other players at my table are doing has no effect in this type of play, other than they might be one of the 36 qualifiers, so their totals would not affect my bets. It's just me against the dealer and if s/he was "cold", we all might do well. As a side note, I watched one table in the first round where the dealer couldn't put together a good hand if his life depended upon it and everyone at that table ended up making the "cut" from those 25 hands alone! I was envious of them, but I also knew that those players still had to make it through round 3, where only one of the six at the table moves to the final round. That's what's so interesting about Bally's tournament; it's more of a "hybrid" event in that the first two rounds are "winner take all", but the semi-finals are "table winner" format where only one of the six moves up. I knew that the lucky guys weren't likely to survive that round, because there's a lot more skill involved from that point on.

But back to my plan. If my slow and steady plan worked, I'd do the same thing in round 2, but if I didn't reach my goal of $2500 in total chips in round one, I'd be more of a kamikaze in the second round. Maybe not a $1000-on-the-first-bet kamikaze, but certainly a lot wilder. How? By just getting more $$$ on the table through splitting 10s, doubling more aggressively and so on. Yes, that calls for a lot more "luck", but it's not like we were playing with real $$$, you know. Plus, the $500 entry fee is refunded to the 36 players who make the cut, so that's a nice incentive.

To make a long story short, I ended round 1 with about $1300 in total chips, so I knew I had to get to over $3500 in round two and I busted out trying to get there. The Blackjack gods had not come to Tunica with me (although the Video Poker gods did, because I hit a $1000 jackpot on a quarter machine), but I did learn a lot, got to meet some very nice people (thanks again for dinner, Ken and Jan) and, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, "I'll be back."

I'll see you then.

ARCHIVE of BLACKJACK ARTICLES