How do blackjack tournaments work

[skelm]

My local Casino is about to have a blackjack tournament and I know the locals aren't very good - to the point of being shocking (I'm a very basic card counter and I think I have an edge against a lot of the players).

Unfortunately I've never seen a blackjack tournament and this is the first time the casino has run one - What can I expect? What are the general rules and how does a blackjack tournament work?

[Armadillo King]

Generic rules:

Each player at the table gets X chips (such as 50,000), and must bet between Y and Z chips every round (for example, 1,000 to 25,000).
After some number of hands (typically in the 20-30 range), whoever has the most chips wins.
Order of betting rotates every hand, since betting last is a huge advantage.

Those are the basic rules. You might see other gimmicks like they have on televised blackjack, but I wouldn't know, since I've never set foot in a casino in my life. (The curse of being 22 and poor.)

I'll let someone else try to give you strategy, since I don't think I could ever hope to describe it anything remotely resembling concisely.

[Toonces]

For some general strategy, read the strategy articles at BlackjackTournaments.com. The bible of BJ tournaments is Wong's "Casino Tournament Strategy", though it doesn't cover more recent innovations.

[flafishy]

The big difference between BJ tourneys and just straight-up BJ is that in a tourney, you're not playing against the dealer so much as keeping up with your opponents' betting. Strategy comes in by calculating the size of your bet on a particular hand based on what your opponents are doing.