The popularity of blackjack tournaments has been fluctuating in the past decades. There was a time when they were extremely popular in land-based casinos, but for some reason they’ve seen a fair amount of desolation for a certain period of time as well. They seem to be making a grand comeback, and with the rise of live casino streaming you can enjoy at virtual casino establishments there are little parts of the world where people can’t participate in a blackjack tournament. But how does it work? We’ll go over the basics with you right here and now.
To be able to participate in any kind of blackjack tournament, it is needed, of course to know how to play blackjack, so it is preferable that you aren’t exactly a beginner. In a game of 21, the player’s goal is to beat the dealer. In a tournament with multiple participants, the player is competing with the dealer and all other players included. The point of the tournament is to win more chips than the dealer and your fellow competitors.
Everyone at the blackjack table starts with the same bankroll, in other words, they are dealt with the same number of chips, known as the starting stack. All entrants are usually required to pay a certain fee in order to gain access to the tourney. The good news is that the casino only takes a small cut of the entry fees and the rest of the funds go towards the tournament prize pool.
As for the tournament configuration, it may vary. Some blackjack tourneys can be played over a single round, while others may take several rounds to complete. Either the number of hands is fixed, or the time is fixed. The important thing is the game is played in a normal fashion, with the player trying to obtain favorable outcomes of each consecutive hand. The rules of a particular tournament will further determine if there will be only one winner, or the payout structure will include multiple participants.
Usually, if the tournament starts with a large initial field of players, the common practice is to eliminate one player at a time after each round and reduce the number of entrants to six or seven players who would play the final round and one of them would become champion. But as we’ve said, the prize pool may be split among top positions instead of going entirely to the tournament winner. In most cases, this is how a blackjack tournament works. However, we have to emphasize that there are multiple types of tournaments and some of them come with sets of specific rules that don’t apply on a general scale.
The most popular format of a blackjack tournament is the elimination tournament, followed by a non-elimination (accumulation) tournament. In the first one, weaker players end up eliminated after rounds, while remaining players advance. In the non-elimination format, all players stay till the end, but they compete on a leaderboard. Blackjack tournaments can also be categorized into single table and multi table competitions. Other trendy kinds of blackjack tournaments include Sit and Go, Free Roll, Rebuy and Satellite.
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